Jonquilyn Hill

These are the kinds of practices that people have been doing forever.

And whether it's in immigrant communities, whether it was in the Black American community, really, I would really say that mutual aid is not new.

It just might have a new visibility in this moment.

And many people do things like this, and they don't think of it as mutual aid.

As I was doing this reporting, many people have never heard that phrase together before.

But do they have a practice of checking on their neighbors and, you know, doing some sort of, like, care work in their community?

Yes.

There is an increase in participation in mutual aid groups right now.

At the same time, we should not see this as a novel phenomenon.

So these networks aren't new, but how'd they come to be in the first place?

And when did we see mutual aid really start to take off?

That's next.

Hi, my name is Jasmine Araujo, and I am part of the Southern Solidarity Grassroots Network.

We were really seeing that these conditions were caused by the capitalist society that we're in.

And so we began doing trainings that helped us become similar or more like the Black Panthers Party.

It's explained it to me.

Humans have been helping each other out as long as we've been around.

But how did we get the formalized networks known as mutual aid?

Tayshia Maddox is an associate professor at Fordham University.

She wrote a book called A Home Away From Home, Mutual Aid, Political Activism, and Caribbean American Identity.