No one will save us but ourselves

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1:11When I am able to pause and think about what world I want to live in, this is it, right? I always look for the helpers, but it's all revolved around building a stronger sense of community.

1:32Jonquilyn Hill: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.

2:09Jonquilyn Hill: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.

2:42Mutual aid is not just another form of aid. It embodies a political analysis and a purpose, which is to say that every person should have the ability to meet their potential, whatever that is.

3:01I'm Devin Kirtis, and I live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, working and organizing with Triangle Mutual Aid. So we like to make a home for people to come and say, I like to fix people's cars. So, okay, so now we have a car repair circle where people teach each other how to fix cars. There's a bike repair circle where people like to do that. I think all of us, all of us, are just like aunties on the block here. And so we just are always looking out for our kupuna, which means elder on our block, in our neighborhood, I'm Nicole Yukinen and I am part of Maui Rapid Response on Maui Hawaii. Mutual aid for us works because we're out in the streets, we're out in the houses, we're listening and observing our neighborhood and we see that Auntie or Tutu has not left her house in a week and we're going to go knock and ask if she's okay.

4:07We have, you know, a team that is responsible for the food mutual aid. We have a team that's responsible for transportation mutual aid. We have a team that's responsible, you know, the patrol stuff. We provided at my son's school rent support for more than 145 families. Ice out! Ice out! Ice! Minneapolis public schools have canceled classes for the next two days. The teachers union says this comes after ICE showed up to the campus of one of their Minneapolis schools. My name is Shannon Gibney and I live in South Minneapolis. And the name of the group that I organize mutual aid with and through is Minneapolis Families for Public Schools.

4:54Obviously, there was a lot of stuff going on in 2020. We made little wash stations before we knew that masks were the important things. and then we helped distribute masks like other people did. We also had a fund for service worker people that lost their jobs in the pandemic and distributed about$80 ,000 in the community. And then Hurricane Helene hit western North Carolina. In Hurricane Helene's wake, devastation and destruction stretching as far as the eye can see. The western city of Asheville in particular has been devastated with flooded roads and loss of power, essentially cutting the city off from any outside aid.

5:33We snapped into sort of disaster relief mode, so we got a donated warehouse space, and we put out collection boxes at grocery stores and coffee shops and bike shops and everything all around town, sent tons of material up to the mountains, collected funding to help pay for expenses, buy generators, do stuff like that.

6:00From here in Maui, where we have just learned that this is now the deadliest wildfire in modern U.S. history. Hundreds of people are still missing. Search and rescue teams are going door to door looking for survivors. The fire was the most horrific thing all of us have experienced in our lives. and the way the community responded after I think is what so many of us are dreaming of the world we want to be living in we were able to actually create a bus system one of the tour buses that normally is you know driving tourists around came to us and said what do you need and we were like actually like people would call in and say okay we have extra a pallet extra of these diapers and somebody would call in and say, oh, I need diapers.

6:48And we would just put that on the bus system that also carried people from hub to hub. It's just everyday people, you know, it's just people who are retired. They have a couple hours in the afternoon, so they're going to do patrols. And it's people who are, you know, like, you know, real estate agents driving around, like commuting, trying to track how ice is moving and alert neighbors when things are not safe.

7:20This summer, we were getting notification that there was a major tsunami coming our way. We had 30 people that already knew like where they are supposed to go and notify the unhoused across the island. But as I was evacuating, these guys that I've been serving sandwiches to for 10 years are like, hey, Nicole, what are you doing? You're driving the wrong way. You're supposed to be up the mountain, right? And they're telling me how and where to evacuate. All these crises that we've had over the past five years that have just rapidly increased in their severity and how much they come at us has resulted in us having a really effective way to notify so that even the most vulnerable have a chance to even make a choice to do something.

8:19There were a number of people who just truly came alive in that moment where they had never been in a place where the assumption was yes. The assumption is yes, you have permission to do whatever needs to be done to help other people. And it was enormously freeing to people. This is the time when I have been the most proud to say that I'm a Minnesotan, actually, as a Black woman. Because I feel that the kind of Faustian deal that this administration has kind of thrust upon us is like, you know, especially with the deaths of legal observers, Renee Good and Alex Preddy, like, well, you can either have your life or you can have your humanity.

9:12Your humanity being the fact that we are all interconnected and that we all belong to each other and therefore we're all responsible for each other. You can have your life or your humanity. And what Minnesotans have said very clearly, emphatically, is we will take our humanity every time.

9:40Jonquilyn Hill:Coming up, the rise of mutual aid and its challenges.

9:49Hey, everybody, Estet Herndon here. I wanted to let you know that Vox Media is returning to South by Southwest in Austin for live tapings of your favorite podcasts. Join us from March 13th through March 15th for live tapings of Pivot, Teffy Talks, Professor G's Markets, Where Should We Begin with Esther Perel, and the special live taping of Today Explained, hosted by yours truly. The Vox Media Podcast stage will also feature sessions from Brene Brown and Adam Grant, Marcus Brownlee, Keith Lee, Vivian Tu, Robin Arzon, and more. Visit voxmedia.com slash southbysouthwest to pre-register and get a special discount on your South by Southwest innovation badge.

10:33That's voxmedia.com slash southbysouthwest. Hope to see you there. After decapitation strikes against Iran's leadership, what can we expect next in the escalating war? The big question is, if there is going to be a next strongman in Iran, what kind of strong man will that person likely be? I don't think that there's going to be another powerful cleric, supreme leader. I'm Jon Feiner. And I'm Jake Sullivan. And we're the hosts of The Long Game, a weekly national security podcast. This week, we sit down with Kareem Sajipour to discuss what to expect in this next phase of the war against Iran. The episode's out now.

11:13Search for and follow The Long Game wherever you get your podcasts. My name's Louise, and I live in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and I am part of Red Hook Mutual Aid. I think in 2020, there was, I had all this energy, so the phone line made a lot of sense to connect with the community in a safe way. I would say we just built a lot of relationships that felt worth maintaining over the last six years.

11:43Jonquilyn Hill:This is Explained It to Me. I'm JQ. 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. 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.

12:21Today, 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 for because of immigration raids. You know, you could call that mutual aid. It really, it's a huge range of practices that might fall under this umbrella.

12:41Jonquilyn Hill:What is the difference between mutual aid and philanthropy and charity? Like, what's the difference here? Among like 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. Like 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 like any kind of hierarchy that might exist in the organizing. Like there's not an executive director.

13:23Instead, people make decisions, you know, 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.

13:42Jonquilyn Hill: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.

14:27We 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 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.

15:11I 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. Local buy nothing Facebook groups where neighbors exchange spare items for free have become an unexpected hub for community members to lend a hand. And I think that's one of the things that some of these organizers speak about is that participating in mutual aid can feel very empowering. You can immediately see the difference that you're making in people's lives.

15:49And, like, they will encourage other people to really take action without, like, worrying too much about, like, are you going to do this tomorrow or are you going to have enough? Like, you can set out a table with food on it and people will take it. And that's enough right now is sort of recognizing that you can do something. And it also doesn't have to be the total solution to the problem.

16:18Jonquilyn Hill:Can you talk about maybe some recent examples of ways mutual aid has filled in the gaps where government assistance has not? Definitely after natural disasters, you'll see like a huge range of mutual aid practices, whether it's a wildfire or a hurricane. There's a beautiful example down in New Orleans of what they called a community power map, where initially it was, you know, I think run by a volunteer group that allowed people to identify if they had power still in their home. And so you could go there to their porch and plug in your devices. I mean, I think that's like a great example of the way that mutual aid is really solving your problem as well as your neighbor's problem at the same time.

17:07Jonquilyn Hill:Okay, what are some of the challenges for mutual aid groups compared to, I don't know, the more traditional ways of giving? I mean, if you are collecting money for anything, yeah, mutual aid groups need to think a little bit about how they're doing that. Because if someone just gets$10 ,000 into their Venmo account, that can look like income and taxable income. So you also want to think about like the privacy and security of the people you're involved with. If you are bringing food to people who are scared to go outside because of their immigration status and you have their addresses, you should think really carefully about where you're storing that information and who has access to it.

17:49I think the power of these networks is that they can respond very fast and be very nimble and change their operations and, you know, really also operates very locally and be very accountable to the people that they're trying to serve. But you are also doing it without a lawyer. And, you know, I think people need to balance their sort of appetite for risk. But, I mean, these organizers also find a lot of meaning and benefit from organizing like this.

18:24Jonquilyn Hill:You know, a lot of these groups ramped up during the pandemic. And then there were snap cuts and natural disasters. Do you think these compounding crises are contributing to that increase in mutual aid? Like, is it the world we live in now that's kind of, I don't know, making people draw together a little bit more? You know, 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 just, yeah, I would really say that mutual aid is not new. It just might have like a new visibility in this moment.

19:02And many people do things like this and they don't think of it as mutual aid. Like as I was doing this reporting, you know, many people have never heard that phrase together. 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.

19:34Jonquilyn Hill: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.

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20:56Hi, 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 thought.

21:24Jonquilyn Hill: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.

22:14In 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 your 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.

22:56Another 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 household expenses and mortgages or their rent or just to survive. And so these associations were really important for these kinds of like financial as well as moral support for immigrant groups.

23:43Jonquilyn Hill:Yeah, when we look to history, do we see a rise in mutual aid? And if we do, do we also see it kind of fall back? Yeah, I think we see a rise, particularly in the period that I study. I look at the early 20th century. So the groups that I look at, I follow from 1890 to 1940. And we see the numbers of mutual aid expand exponentially in this period, particularly before World War II. And then we kind of see a weaning back of mutual aid once we have government institutions that are being implemented. I think that takes away the need for some of the groups, but not all of them. And so many of them persist.

24:26Jonquilyn Hill:After these early groups, where do we start to see mutual aid appear next?