A Conversation on Mutual Aid - 1/27/2025

Conversation Overview

Mutual aid efforts are often guided by a commitment to “solidarity not charity.” Join us for a conversation about the meaning of this guiding principle, the limitations of "charity" and the power of mutual aid networks. This conversation will feature mutual aid participants from WashMasks, Feed the Block, Super Familia KC, Common Humanity Collective, and SF Mutual Aid and will be facilitated by Sien Méndez.

WashMasks works to provide care, creative joy, and community to Washington farmworkers, their families, and other BIPOC rural communities. WashMasks is an all-volunteer mutual aid consisting of artists, classroom teachers, public school administrators, and the extended arts community from across Washington State. The communities we work with deserve support, dignity, and advocacy. Since its launch in May 2020, WashMasks has grown from a simple request for masks to a wide network of volunteers, crafters, and community organizers. We have provided wild fire relief, bilingual books, school supplies, toys, and infant care goods to migrant farmworkers and their families.

SF Mutual Aid is a community-driven response to COVID-19, to meet the most urgent needs in our neighborhoods. We are a collective of Bay Area residents & organizers coming together for the purpose of meeting the needs of our local community members during the COVID-19 Crisis. In collaboration with neighborhood groups, grassroots organizers, and Bay Area nonprofits, we are working to fill in the gaps left by the state by providing resources and strengthening our community bonds through collective care. 

Feed the Block is a mutual aid and organizing collective on the Tongva land, also known as the Western Inland Empire. We are a collective of members with various identities and majority Black and Brown women and femmes. We feed consciousness by feeding people, addressing ourselves to their needs, the basic and social needs, working, and organizing toward a united national left.

The first and only grassroots group in the United States led by unaccompanied and undocumented youth organizers, Super Familia King County is a mutual aid group organized to resist traditional social services that can endanger unaccompanied and undocumented youth. It aims to create community and support immigrant youth.

Common Humanity Collective- We help ordinary people come together to create and redistribute the things our communities need in the face of deprivation and disaster. As we suffer crisis after crisis, each one more excruciating than the last, our government fails to address the inequalities that make them so devastating—particularly for people impacted by environmental racism and ableism. While the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic claims the lives of millions across the world, it has also provoked dramatic and far-reaching examples of mutual aid and cooperation. Globally, hundreds of thousands of ordinary people have mobilized to better protect neighbors in their communities. Our own group, CHC, developed a grassroots network of production and distribution through which over 60,000 N95-style nanofiber masks were assembled and distributed, along with enough hand sanitizer to supply over 100,000 people in the Bay Area within our first few years. We continue distributing masks alongside thousands of DIY air purifiers in response to the wildfires ravaging California, as well as persistent industrial pollution, which continually make our air unhealthy to breathe. Our own group, CHC, developed a grassroots network of production and distribution through which over 60,000 N95-style nanofiber masks were assembled and distributed, along with enough hand sanitizer to supply over 100,000 people in the Bay Area within our first few years. We continue distributing masks alongside thousands of DIY air purifiers in response to the wildfires ravaging California, as well as persistent industrial pollution, which continually make our air unhealthy to breathe. Surviving these increasingly apocalyptic circumstances will require us to cultivate, on larger scales and with more political vigor, practices of mutual aid and cooperation. We encourage everyone, including those we meet at the point of distribution, to take charge of the production and distribution processes and help build an ever-expanding community of confidence, autonomy, and self-sufficiency. We believe that such practices around the world must be nurtured and grown alongside more traditional class struggles, such as radical labor unions and tenant councils, to ensure the possibility of a truly egalitarian future beyond capitalism.