What is Mutual aid?

What is Mutual aid?

Mutual aid is the practice of taking up a responsibility to care for the people in your community. Mutual aid efforts are often created by setting up collaborative community exchanges of resources. It doesn’t have to be fancy or complicated, anyone can perform mutual aid with the resources they have on hand. Mutual aid can look as simple as handing out cold water bottles from your vehicle as you run your daily errands, or as complex as getting together a group that goes out weekly to pass out free food and clothing at a local park.  

In Tucson, we have a vibrant mutual aid community! Folks all over town spend their time, money and energy to create and provide resources that would otherwise not exist, to meet the needs of this community. This looks like food distributions, clothing exchanges, medical supply drives, resource signup booths, etc.

Mutual aid differs from charity because it seeks to benefit everyone in the community, including the people who organize the resources or services and the people who build mutual aid organizations may also need the resources the systems provide, or may be close to those who do. Often the passion that drives these projects comes from someone who learned how difficult it was to access the resource through personal experience and wanted to work to make it more accessible to everyone. 

When practicing mutual aid there is often an emphasis on the natural exchange of stories, art and connection between people that makes this practice so powerful. Someone might show up thinking they’re just there to “volunteer” and go home, but during distribution they meet someone with a story that really resonates with them, and maybe they never see that person again, but their story fundamentally changes how that person lives their life moving forward. That is the beauty of coming together as a community and taking responsibility for each other.