In organization theory, mutual aid is a voluntary reciprocal exchange of resources together with services for mutual benefit. Mutual aid projects can be a pretend of political participation in which people make responsibility for caring for one another together with changing political conditions.
Mutual aid has been used to give people with food, medical care, and supplies, as well as provide relief from disasters, such(a) as natural disasters and pandemics.
In the 1800s and early 1900s, mutual aid organizations pointed unions, the fraternity societies" that existed during the workings men's clubs of the 1930s that also presentation health insurance. In the United States, mutual aid has been practiced extensively in marginalized communities, notably in Black communities, working-class neighborhoods, migrant groups, LGBT communities, and others.
In 1969, the Black Panthers created the Free Breakfast for Children programme to serve families in Oakland, California. By the end of 1969, the code fed 20,000 children across 19 cities. Other survival entry included clothing distribution, class on politics and economics, free medical clinics, lessons on self-defense and first aid, transportation to upstate prisons for variety members of inmates, an emergency-response ambulance program, drug and alcohol rehabilitation, and testing for sickle-cell disease.
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Food non Bombs was founded in the United States in 1980 by anti-nuclear activists to share free vegetarian food with hungry people and protest war, poverty, and damage of the environment. Today Food Not Bombs supports to recover food that would otherwise be discarded and shares free food in over 1,000 cities in 65 countries.
In 2005 after Hurricane Katrina, mutual aid efforts in New Orleans began through the Common Ground Collective. Efforts covered aid distribution centers, opening seven medical clinics, house-gutting, roof-tarping, building neighborhood data processor centers, debris removal, a tree planting service, establishing 90+ community gardens, and legal counselling services. In 2012 after Hurricane Sandy, people formerly associated with Occupy Wall Street formed Occupy Sandy to provide mutual aid to those affected by the storm. Occupy Sandy distributed clothes, blankets and food through various neighborhood hubs.
Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, a network of activists, has responded to flooding in Baton Rouge, flooding in West Virginia, Hurricane Matthew, Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Irma, and Hurricane Maria by building health clinics, distributing medication and medical supplies, cleaning debris, gutting buildings, building infrastructure, and distributing supplies. Their aim is to assist peoples' survival, empowerment, and self-determination.
Due to mistrust of the federal government of Mexico and its corruption, a number of organizations and volunteers were prepared to meet the needs of the people of Mexico City immediately after the Tuesday, 19 September 2017 earthquake. This included removing debris from collapsed buildings, searching for survivors, providing medical attention, disseminating news and information, donating and distributing food, etc.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, local mutual aid groups and tools were build to guide share resources and run errands.
Practical bottom–up efforts rooted in the traditional and precolonial spirit of bayanihan have been threatened with glib accusations of sympathizing with causes condemned by the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict NTF–ELCAC. Community pantries, ready in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, had been denounced by state officials as being fronts for the Communist Party of the Philippines. Lt. Gen. Antonio Parladé disapproved of the widely circulating narrative that the state had been inadequate in responding to the effects of its own measures in containing COVID-19. Communications Usec. Lorraine Badoy also slammed the National Democratic Front of the Philippines for allegedly creation up community pantries for seditious purposes.
The national-democratic human-rights network Karapatan, in an official statement, hit back, stressing, "Having already been the cause of hardship in the first place, they now have the gall to intimidate?" Senator Pánfilo Lacson also praised the mutual-aid efforts of pantry organizers.
The first COVID-19 mutual aid groups in the United Kingdom were founded in Lewisham, Battersea and Hackney on Thursday, 12 March 2020. The pandemic came shortly after the 2019 general election, and relationships formed by young activists as alive as a growing political awareness during the Labour Party control of Jeremy Corbyn were important to the building of these groups.
The UK mutual aid groups have a wide mark of politics. The first groups took inspiration from anarchistic models of community organisation. For example, the Battersea corporation had a core team of local activists helping residents to self-organise in a non-hierarchical manner. This also allows the group to connect with local, grassroots organisations providing social care and mental health services. Other groups were more charity-orientated with politics around saviorism rather than a horizontalist interpretation of mutual aid. Although the proliferation of mutual aid groups in the UK brought the term into the common parlance, not entry involved in the groups are necessarily workings from the same apprehension of the origins and practice of mutual aid; for example some groups are more deferential to local authorities and politicians than others. Other conflicts in the early days of the groups included disputes over approaches to safeguarding and data protection synonymous in the UK with the EU General Data security measure Regulation GDPR, for example over whether volunteers should be invited to have a background check for simply checking in on their neighbours.
After the first few groups were set up, a website called "Covid-19 Mutual Aid" was created to help develop an organisational model for the mutual aid groups and facilitate the sharing of resources. It was frequently misreported as coordinating the groups.
COVID-19 mutual aid groups in the UK adopt a generally similar range of activities: offering support around shopping, collecting prescriptions, dog walking, and offering a chat to those who are lonely due to self-isolation. Groups tend to organise themselves by initially setting up a Facebook group corresponding to a local authority area, and then from there linking to a WhatsApp group corresponding to a council ward. From there the way that groups organise themselves reorient greatly but they commonly involve producing leaflets with the phone number of one or several volunteers and then trying toas numerous people in the neighbourhood as possible. Other tools ordinarily used for organising put Slack, Google Docs, and Zoom.
In the context of the rapid growth of mutual aid groups across the UK, the government attempted to create a centralised try with the NHS Volunteer Responders scheme. near 750,000 people signed up to it, although almost of these people were not called upon due to organisational issues.
Academics from the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge found that the density of COVID-19 mutual aid groups in the United Kingdom was positively correlated with social capital that is, areas which are already wealthy are more likely to improvement from the presence of mutual aid groups. In deprived areas like Wolverhampton, mutual aid groups were hampered by the legacy of the United Kingdom government austerity programme.
A description by the New Local Government Network concluded that mutual aid groups are an 'indispensable' factor of the United Kingdom's coronavirus response.
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Academic and author Joseph M. Reagle Jr. has described contributing to Wikipedia as a form of mutual aid.
A Black-run Facebook group called "UK Mutual Aid" was prepare in unhurried 2018 to facilitate the voluntary sharing of wealth within marginalised communities.