Mutual Aid Is A Lifeline

My dad was raised in the countryside of Haiti. A rural village called Caracol. The village houses over 7,000 people facing the brunt of economic instability. Fishing is the primary source of sustenance; the catch is then prepared in the single-lit room of one’s house. Many raised in Caracol speak of the frustrations of systemic neglect; how many crucial services don’t extend across the village. In response, the residents of Caracol take matters of caretaking and community support into their own hands. It’s a practice as old as time, called “bon voisinage” ​or good neighbourliness.

Neighbourhood kids running the food their mother just cooked across the street to the auntie they just spent all afternoon with. The uncle that drives all the children to school. The exchange of produce grown in respective gardens. The carpool to the nearby river to collect water. Watching over other people’s children as if they are your own. Spending the day at the market buying groceries not just for your household, but the one adjacent to yours. Understanding the duty to take care of another as you take care of yourself. Age-old practices summarized in the modern lexicon with six simple words: “We take care of each other.”  

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Collective care models have been the ethos of communities across the globe for millennia. The conditions of 2020, however, brought them to the surface. In the midst of rapidly changing COVID mandates, ricocheting precautions and fervent attempts to keep vulnerable community members safe, mutual aid—a form of collective action to redistribute resources, funds and support to those in need in response to the lack of state care—emerged as a life-saving avenue. According to Statistica, in 2020 alone, the volume of funds raised through crowdfunding worldwide amounted to $114 billion USD. The term “caremongering,” a form of mutual aid, was first coined by a Toronto Facebook Group in an attempt to counter the “scaremongering” that occurred during the pandemic.

For Omar Kinnarath, founder of Mutual Aid Society Winnipeg, the idea to start a mutual aid network first came to him during the 2008 financial crisis. In early 2020, worried about neighbours losing their homes and their access to food, he created the Facebook page for Mutual Aid Society Winnipeg and then spent time studying similar mutual aid groups in other countries. 

The Society launched officially in March 2020. “We were watching the lockdowns in China and Italy and knew it was only a matter of time,” he says. “Within the first day, we got 1,000 members, and we have slowly grown to nearly 15,000 members now.” Today, he says the organization is known as “one of the most accessible places in the city you can go when you need help.” 

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By June 2021, the caremongering movement had quickly spread across Canada and the rest of the world with over 246 groups worldwide; 191 of which were Canadian. There were e-transfers, emergency support funds and GoFundMes but there was also so much more—designers who used their talents to create and donate masks, scrub caps and gowns to hospitals; volunteer-driven initiatives to deliver food to low-income seniors with limited access, outreach and harm reduction initiatives to support and resource unhoused communities—these were the backbones of community care during the pandemic.  

Amy Kipp is a PhD candidate at the University of Guelph who studies care movements and community care practices. Her research is grounded in feminist principles that define care as “everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair the world,” she says. “Caremongering allows for autonomy and agency so that people can define their own care needs and… where there are gaps in care systems. Mutual aid is a radical care-based model that is about working alongside folks and doing that care work together.”

Mutual Aid Society Winnipeg is a good example of the values Kipp describes. The organization takes a decentralized, membership-driven approach. Members coordinate requests for drop-offs, pickups and errands. “We have a huge Indigenous population, I would say like 80 percent of our members are Indigenous folks,” says Lara Rae, one of the group’s administrators. “So the concept of mutual aid, that's part of Indigenous culture. It's nothing new or radical to this community. All we did was provide a platform for something that was already ingrained in the culture of the city.”

A glance at the Society’s Facebook page shows requests and responses for aid in plumbing, yard work and other household tasks. There are folks making requests for specific ingredients for meals as well as for diapers.  

“For people to be able to give and share the small amounts they have, and to collaborate in various ways, to set things up and organize within the group, even if they were just small little meetups, to me are the seeds of growth, of people taking charge of their own homes, their own lives in a society that oppresses and pushes them down in so many myriad ways,” says Rae.

Four years after the first COVID lockdown, the efforts to provide community support have shifted. “A look at the database of caremongering Facebook groups collected in March 2020 tells me that most of those groups no longer exist,” says Dr. Yvonne Su, an assistant professor at York University in Toronto who has studied post-disaster relief and humanitarian relief since Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines.  

Still, efforts to keep communities safe globally predate the pandemic and will endure beyond COVID times. This is especially vital as Su notes that research shows social divisions and inequalities return, often stronger, after the immediate danger of a disaster passes.

Taylor McNallie was emboldened after the first wave of caremongering in 2020. The pandemic combined with global political unrest helped the Calgary resident turn her sights to activism. In 2022, she helped to create two grassroots programs aimed at providing support to locals in need of assistance: Mutual Aid Canada, a national crowdsourcing effort that allows recipients to post their urgent needs and donors to respond directly to those seeking. She is also a co-creator of Walls Down Collective, a grassroots initiative that provides access to resources and support through weekly food distribution, harm reduction and a 24/7 community crisis response line as an alternative to calling law enforcement.  

A single parent, McNallie understands firsthand the shame that comes with financial and food insecurity. “I've been a single parent for 11 years. That’s in part what keeps me going because I've been without a home many times, I've lost many homes from not being able to pay rent. There's been many times I had no food in my fridge. There's been many times where I needed help and support,” she says. “In doing this work, I realized how much of that is not an individual failure, but it's a societal failure.” 

Accessing support from both Mutual Aid Canada and the Mutual Aid Society is as low-barrier as possible. “We don’t require or ask people to prove that they're poor or to prove their situations,” says McNallie. “It's just having trust in individuals that they are coming to you in confidence that you can help support.”

This trust is a core aspect of the giving circles that have transcended decades and borders. For Black communities in particular, writer Vicky Mochama notes in a 2022 piece for The Walrus, the historic practice of mutual aid dates back to enslavement periods. “What enslaved people in Haiti and elsewhere knew is not too distant from the wisdom of Somali mothers and Grenadian aunties: if everyone gives, everyone gets,” Mochama writes.“It’s not just money; it’s a practice of trust.”

Despite the altruistic nature of caremongering, I can’t help but wonder—what are the implications when governments are absolved of responsibility by relying on community care interventions? What happens when the systems of care we have in place don’t address our needs and the responsibility to care is offloaded solely to individuals? How do we continue to hold governments accountable for the insufficient supports that lead us to rely on one another?  Dr. Su warns this is one of the pitfalls of mutual aid. “I knew that politicians were going to spin this as best they can and move responsibility away from themselves for causing any harm or not preventing harm,” she says, “and saying that the communities themselves can fend for themselves.” It’s  a trend she has coined as “resilience-washing.” 

In Toronto, for example, after different levels of government played tug-of-refusal with refugee lives and livelihoods in the summer of 2023, several local churches stepped in to house and support the hundreds of people who were left stranded as they awaited resources from the city. This benevolence was rewarded with a refusal to act by both the municipal and provincial governments. Nearly a year later, the federal government proposed additional funding that ended a standoff with the city.

In Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis (And the Next), author Dean Spade—a longtime mutual aid expert—talks about mutual care as an alternative to reliance on government institutions. “‘Mutual aid’ is one term used to describe collective coordination to meet each other’s needs, usually stemming from an awareness that the systems we have in place are not going to meet them. Those systems, in fact, have often created the crisis, or are making things worse,” he writes. 

“When you climb up seven flights of stairs in the sweltering heat to drop off an air conditioner to kookum, who's melting up, deep down you feel sad that this has to happen,” says Kinnarath, talking about his experience with mutual aid work. “But, you’re reminded this may possibly save a hospital visit. This may actually save a life. So, this is why we do it.”

What has emerged from the smoke of the pandemic is clear: Mutual aid serves as a necessary intervention to withstand the brutal systems we live under. It has become a lifeline for vulnerable members of our communities. A north star directive. The threads that have kept us bound and affirmed the need for interdependence. The principles of collective care and mutuality reveal the infinite possibilities that can occur when we take care of each other.