Four Key Takeaways from Mutual Aid Organizing During the COVID-19 Pandemic - Beeck Center

A challenge for any mutual aid platform will be privacy, surveillance, and ethics — building in safety to protect the most vulnerable communities.

Mutual aid has been ubiquitous in indigenous communities and examples can be found throughout history such as medieval craft guilds, American fraternity societies that existed during the Great Depression (providing health and life insurance and funeral benefits). In more recent times, mutual aid organizations, projects and initiatives have formed a... See more

Rather than focusing so much on the institutions that are failing us, what if we take on the functions that our institutions are failing to execute? The more engaged we are in mutual aid, the less our impoverished neighbors need to depend on the institutionalized social safety net for their food and shelter. The more we engage our troubled friends ... See more

How the Past can Inform the Future: Commoning & Mutual Aid

Mutual Aid organizations structurally rely on establishing a path for volunteers to participate as a means to operate and growing, branded communities should pay attention to that format.

emblematic ideas to take forward could include: * resilient and diverse communities as essential foundations; * the value of trust in government and civic institutions; * recognising the agility and capability latent within the public sector; * and the enormous value of inefficiency and redundancy in systems; * an understanding that there are essen... See more