Walking around a campus the other day and saw several posters referencing making money donations to a cause to in support of a “mutual” aid action. How is “mutual” aid different than just donating to a non profit / NGO?
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From the Wikipedia article:
Mutual aid is an organizational model where voluntary, collaborative exchanges of resources and services for common benefit take place amongst community members to overcome social, economic, and political barriers to meeting common needs. This can include physical resources like food, clothing, or medicine, as well as services like breakfast programs or education. These groups are often built for the daily needs of their communities, but mutual aid groups are also found throughout relief efforts, such as in natural disasters or pandemics like COVID-19.
Resources are shared unconditionally, contrasting this model from charity where conditions for gaining access to help are often set, such as means testing or grant stipulations. These groups often go beyond material or service exchange and are set up as a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions.
Mutual aid groups are distinct in their drive to flatten the hierarchy, searching for collective consensus decision-making across participating people rather than placing leadership within a closed executive team. With this joint decision-making, all participating members are empowered to enact change and take responsibility for the group.
It’s just people helping other people without any sort of means testing for whether or not they deserve it. You set up to hand out free food and it doesn’t matter who shows up, you give them free food, you don’t ask to see their bank statements or make them go through endless paperwork.
They don’t usually have an official organizational structure, but some famous ngos got their start as mutual aid projects. Most of the time it’s just a group of like minded people who just decide to go do something good without an organization telling them how or where.
Its largely a concept that came out of anarchist/communist circles of on a small scale donating to those in need within your local community. It largely contrasts with the non profit/charity model in that there is little to no rigid organization deciding where the money goes and instead it’s largely just people in a community donating to those in need on an altruistic basis. Whether someone needs the help is largely determined by trust of those donating. Whether it’s a more effective model of charity than traditional charity is up for debate, there is certainly an argument against regular charity that its administrative overhead makes it wasteful.
Though frankly in recent years it’s become more of a buzzword and has strayed from this, often just becoming much the same as regular charity but with “leftist lingo.”
mutual aid is like helping each other out directly instead of just giving money to a big org. it’s more personal and builds community. it’s cool to see people care for each other directly instead of just donating and forgetting.
Mutual aid also serve as assistance options that help to support local, micro actions. https://www.mutualaidhub.org/
Generally decentralized, community based direct aid action, largley without the support of larger nonprofits, governments, or religious organizations. These groups are generally more involved with the individual and unique needs of a community than the larger, more hierarchical orginized efforts, often from outside these communities.
I live in Nebraska. We commonly use the term mutual aid for instances when local fire and police departments go to other police or fire departments’ jurisdictions because they need the help. The expectation is that the other agencies would come and help your local agencies if they needed it, reciprocating the assistance.
mutual aid is like if your friend helps you move and then you help them later. it’s about community helping each other instead of just one-way donations. makes it more personal and connected so everyone’s involved in a good way
“Regular aid” is more like charity, whereby you give money or resources to someone else without expecting anything in return yourself.
Mutual Aid is where groups of people group together to benefit one another.
For example, the concept of a “[library of things](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_things)” is a good example of this.
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