Op: RenegAID is a campaign that empowers people with the tools to create and/or fortify local and virtual mutual aid networks, providing Vegan food, other necessities, and services to humans and non-humans in need.
We’re getting active on the ground and online to share our skills, time, and resources in order to strengthen our communities and build collective power. We’re looking to successful movements of the past to guide us as we navigate the present. Most importantly: we’re supporting each other. Because we’re all we got.
WHAT IS MUTUAL AID?
When it comes to defining mutual aid, we need not reinvent the wheel. We align with and amplify the work of Dean Spade - a queer, trans, and abolitionist activist.
The following are the three key elements of mutual aid, as outlined in Spade’s article, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next). Check out the article for an in-depth analysis on the ins and outs of mutual aid work, including real-world examples of mutual aid in action.
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“Mutual aid projects expose the reality that people do not have what they need and propose that we can address this injustice together. The most famous example in the United States is the Black Panther Party’s survival programs, which ran throughout the 1960s and 1970s, including a free breakfast program, free ambulance program, free medical clinics, a service offering rides to elderly people doing errands, and a school aimed at providing a rigorous liberation curriculum to children. The Black Panther programs welcomed people into the liberation struggle by creating spaces where they could meet basic needs and build a shared analysis about the conditions they were facing.”
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“Mutual aid is essential to building social movements. People often come to social movement groups because they need something: eviction defense, childcare, social connection, health care, or help in a fight with the government about something like welfare benefits, disability services, immigration status, or custody of their children. Being able to get help in a crisis is often a condition for being politically active, because it’s very difficult to organize when you are also struggling to survive. Getting support through a mutual aid project that has a political analysis of the conditions that produced your crisis also helps to break stigma, shame, and isolation.”
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“Mutual aid projects help people develop skills for collaboration, participation, and decision-making. For example, people engaged in a project to help one another through housing court proceedings will learn the details of how the system harms people and how to fight it, but they will also learn about meeting facilitation, working across differences, retaining volunteers, addressing conflict, giving and receiving feedback, following through, and coordinating schedules and transportation. They may also learn that it is not just lawyers who can do this kind of work, and that many people—including themselves!—have something to offer. This departs from expertise-based social services that tell us we need to have a social worker, licensed therapist, lawyer, or some other person with an advanced degree to get things done.”