Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I got in the water in the very early morning before the sun had risen and the water was pitch black. I started swimming and I felt the water hollowing out around me and felt like something really big was swimming below.
I'm Phoebe Judge and this is Love, a show about the surprising things that love can make us do. More than 100 episodes available now on This Is Love.
When I am able to pause and think about what world I want to live in, this is it, right?
Always look for the helpers. But it's all revolved around building a stronger sense of community.
I've been thinking a lot about my neighbors lately, what it means to help them, what it means to be in community with them. We spend so much time online talking to strangers, but how are the people down the street doing?
I've asked myself this question a lot lately, but it first entered the back of my mind around the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, when groups sprang up across the country to help people who were sick or who were caring for others. Here in D.C., where I live, I saw so many listservs pop up, people offering to grab groceries for neighbors or to give away masks that they made.
And even though the needs have changed since 2020, there are groups all around the country that are still going strong. Neighbors helping to meet the needs of neighbors rather than relying on government assistance or charity. This type of help is known as mutual aid. I'm Jonquan Hill. This is Explain It to Me from Vox.
And this week, we talk to folks around the country who are engaging in this work right now. Mutual aid is not just another form of aid.
It embodies a political analysis and a purpose, which is, you know, to say that every person should have the ability to meet their potential, whatever that is.
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Chapter 2: What is mutual aid and how does it differ from traditional charity?
I'm J.Q. We've heard from people who are finding ways to help their communities. But how does mutual aid work exactly? I asked Thalia Beatty. She's a reporter at the Associated Press who covers nonprofits and philanthropy. I mean, it's a thing people have been doing forever, you know, everywhere.
It's neighbors helping neighbors and meeting their needs, drawing on resources that they have in their community.
Chapter 3: How did mutual aid networks emerge during the COVID-19 pandemic?
It can be anything from people handing out food, putting on item exchanges where, you know, you basically bring a bunch of stuff together and give it back out for free. Today, you might call someone who's, you know, walking a child to school or bringing them back home because their parents, you know, are scared to leave their home because of immigration raids.
You know, you could call that mutual aid. Really, it's a huge range of practices that might fall under this umbrella. What is the difference between mutual aid and philanthropy and charity? What's the difference here? Among a group of mutual aid networks, they see a big difference between what they're doing in their communities and what nonprofits and formal funders are doing.
One of the mantras of mutual aid is solidarity, not charity. And what they're getting at there is that they see themselves as taking actions that meet their own needs and the needs of their neighbors. And a lot of these groups try to eliminate any kind of hierarchy that might exist in the organizing. There's not an executive director. Instead, people make decisions with some sort of consensus.
You know, many of these groups are also not organized or incorporated as formal nonprofits. You know, giving money to a mutual aid network, you know, won't give you necessarily a tax deduction if they're not an incorporated nonprofit. So those are some of the differences. Okay. Have we seen an increase in mutual aid? Like, how is that? How do you quantify that kind of thing?
Yeah, I mean, I have not been able to find, you know, any kind of authoritative survey of mutual aid networks. But in speaking with organizers of mutual aid, I think anecdotally we can say often these kinds of practices really pick up in times of crisis. So in 2020, there was a big uptick in mutual aid organizing around the pandemic.
As our schools and our jobs and sort of our daily life shut down, people got together to try to make sure their neighbors and the people they care about were taken care of. We started with... I think all the other mutual aid groups in New York in 2020. We started as a phone line taking incoming calls from our zip code for people in need of whatever. They could ask for information.
They could ask for a COVID test. We wanted to specifically support houseless people who we noticed weren't getting any help. resources from the government during the pandemic, like they weren't even getting information. So we made pamphlets for them of what was going on and we handed out food and supplies.
If you're watching and, you know, hearing the news, you might feel like you really want to take steps to respond to any number of things that people are struggling with. I mean, in the fall, the government shutdown meant that Many people were not going to access their SNAP benefits. So you saw like a real concerted effort to hand out food, like make food available to people.
Community fridges are popping up in neighborhoods across Salt Lake City.
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Chapter 4: What role do community members play in mutual aid efforts?
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Thank you.
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.
We were teaching ourselves Black radical thoughts.
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.
So I would say in the African-American communities, particularly those in antebellum society, we have examples of mutual aid. In the North, there were free Black societies that participated in mutual aid around schools for free people or the formerly enslaved. So there were free African societies that were founded as early as the 1700s in places like Philadelphia and in New York.
In the late 19th century, we see immigrant groups such as the Chinese and Jewish communities. And in all of these groups, we see this idea of providing health and examples of like life insurance for each other, particularly workers' comp when workers' comp was not a thing. And so if you got sick on the job and you couldn't go to work, they provided a portion of your wages to you.
For many people who come as immigrants, they come usually by themselves and are single. And so they provided family and connection for immigrants who are in a new city, in a new country, oftentimes by themselves. And so they provided this network. Another really important function of these mutual aids and that we see across many of the groups, particularly in the U.S.,
In the Chinese, Caribbean and Jewish groups are collective fund in which members paid into. And so in the Caribbean communities, they were called susus. And what they were were rotating credit practices. And so everyone put in a certain amount of money and then you had a chance to take out that money to use for small loans for people.
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