Mutual aid is a horizontal, community-wide effort, unlike philanthropy or charity. It's a tangible way that individual people can make a difference by supporting their own communities, creating a strong foundation for the world we need to fight for. Things like donating/distributing food, offering and sharing rides, childcare for your neighbors and friends, disaster relief, finance pooling, and many other things like this are all examples of mutual aid. Providing this alternative infrastructure that we can mutually rely on is necessary to dismantling the flawed infrastructure we already have in place. 

Here are a couple examples:

To retrain ourselves, regain our human instincts for empathy, and help facilitate the type of mutual aid networks mentioned above, it's important to create, maintain, and support our local third places.

“In sociology, the third place refers to the social surroundings that are separate from the two usual social environments of home (‘first place’) and the workplace (‘second place’).” 

Examples of these include libraries, cafes, bars, churches, malls, any place that serves to facilitate social interaction. (Three of these five examples come with the expectation of spending money, which is not ideal, but given that we live in late-stage capitalism we need to take what we can get.) As more and more aspects of our lives become digital, there has been the creation of online third places, but they lack the in-person interaction needed for our mental health and the physical proximity needed for meaningful mutual aid networks to develop. If you can think of a third place in your community, support its growth and role in the community, and encourage others to do the same.