Quick Bullet Points
- The belief that everyone deserves unconditional access to food, clean water, housing, healthcare, love, art, and community without requirements (means testing) or the expectation of payback
- Non-hierarchical horizontal organizing
- Solidarity not charity
- Direct action
- Direct democracy often through consensus building
- Community building
- A focus on impact, not just intent
- Mutual aid is neighbors helping neighbors directly. It’s about people in a community sharing resources, skills, and support in ways that are rooted in care and connection, and without conditions or judgement.
- Mutual aid is not charity, and it’s not about one group giving to another. It’s about recognizing that we all have needs and something to offer, regardless of circumstances.
- By showing up for each other, we build relationships, trust, and a stronger, more resilient community where everyone has a better chance to thrive.
Mutual Aid vs Charity
Mutual aid is a term to describe people giving each other needed material support, trying to resist the control dynamics, hierarchies and system-affirming oppressive arrangements of charity and social services. Mutual aid projects are a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions, not just through symbolic acts or putting pressure on their representatives in government, but by actually building new social relations that are more survivable. We are prefiguring the world we want to live in.
Why Mutual Aid is NOT Charity:
- “Charity” is a framework that often means rich people giving to poor people. Usually there are lots of strings attached to what they give: e.g., giving only to mothers, only to children, only to sober people, only to people of faith and other “deserving poor” models.
- This means that charity is often a strategy for controlling poor people.
- Charity also frames people in need as morally lesser than rich people—as if poverty were the fault of the poor rather than the fault of systems of racism, heteropatriarchy, ableism, land theft and labor exploitation that make some people rich and keep other people poor.
- Charity looks like generosity from rich people, but actually upholds the systems that make most people poor for the benefit of the few.
- Charity often puts requirements and barriers to aid: recipients need to get sober, they need to get “housing-ready,” they need to take parenting classes, they need to work harder.
- In reality, poverty is a result of capitalism, and marginalized people are often the poorest people because of capitalist, white-supremacist, imperialist patriarchy. Social service agencies typically employ middle and upper class people, often with racial and educational privilege, and put them in the role of judging and controlling poor people, while the people most affected by the issues they claim to address have no say in what they do or how they work.
What Mutual Aid IS:
Mutual aid projects depart from the norms of charity, social services and non-profitization in several key ways:
- An understanding that it is the system, not the people suffering under it, that creates poverty, crisis, and vulnerability.
- Governance by, and with input from, people who are most affected.
- Full transparency, including any money used or managed.
- Many mutual aid projects are not funded and are all volunteer run.
- No expectation of payment or repayment
- Open meetings and pathways for new people to join and participate
- Political education within the organization to help those working in the project to expand their awareness of experiences that are not their own, to build solidarity, and to make the project supportive, welcoming, and respectful to marginalized people.
- Humility and willingness to accept feedback about how to make the project more useful to the people it serves
- Long-term ongoing commitment to each project that is accountable to the recipients of the aid
- Connection to and solidarity with other mutual aid projects and other transformative work
- Commitment to dignity and self-determination of people in need or crisis
- Collaborative decision making and shared power rather than majority rule
