by Stella R.
What is mutual aid during Trump’s authoritarian regime?
Mutual aid is about building solidarity NOT charity, sharing resources and building community networks.
“It is a form of organizing integral to all influential and successful social movements,” according to Dean Spade, a social justice activist, attorney and author of several books on how to fight fascism.
In his most recent book, Mutual Aid Building Solidarity During the Current Crisis (and the Next), he cites several examples of mutual aid that go back to the founding of this country by white settlers.
For example, during the period of slavery dating back to the 1780’s, Black communities came together to provide aid for burials, support for widows and orphans, and care for the sick. In the 1800’s, they built the Underground Railroad, along with white abolitionists, to help slaves escape the South.
“Mutual aid exposes the failures of the current system and shows an alternative,” adds Spade.
More recent examples of mutual aid include: the effort, in the 1950’s, to build a ride-sharing system during the months’ long Montgomery Bus Boycott, allowing people to continue working and provide for their families; the Black Panthers Free Breakfast Programs for children of the 1960’s; and the currently ongoing efforts to raise money for abortions and travel for women who can’t access abortions in their state.
Mutual aid connects communities and helps build social movements for transformative change. It’s within this framework, that IEB’s Immigration Action Team is building IEB’s Mutual Aid Program.
By mobilizing IEB’s membership to participate in food donation, bagging food and distribution, the program will build stronger ties with the community groups that are on the ground. In coordination with Adopt-a-Corner and Street Level Health Project (SLHP),we are supporting teams that work directly with the immigrant community.
In each food package we provide to day laborers, we include important information that SLHP has asked us to distribute. This includes a flyer that assists day laborers with arranging to have an emergency contact person who has information needed to provide assistance in case of an abduction. Thanks to Whistlemania, we also include whistle packets with our food packages.
We are also building relationships that cross racial and class boundaries — such as our effort to coordinate with Faith in Action East Bay (FIAEB) and other similar community groups.
IEB’s Mutual Aid Program is a work in progress that will continue to evolve. We continue to explore how we can work with immigrant-led organizations, as well as the day laborers, to expand our solidarity efforts and support immigrant community defense.
Of special note, dozens of IEB members generously donated food at our May 31 IEB All Members Meeting (AMM). Volunteers then worked to organize and create 80 bags of food and distributed these bags to day laborers at Home Depot and other sites. With the support of the IEB membership, our goal is to continue this effort and develop a strategic plan for monthly distributions to the immigrant community.
If there is one lesson we can learn from organizers in Minneapolis, it’s that we should organize NOW and not wait until after ICE arrives. Building infrastructure now helps us be prepared for the future. And that’s exactly what we are doing!
