Mutual Aid

Interested in buildin mutual aid in your neighborhood? Review these helpful resources: 

• NYS Mutual Aid is “a joint effort of the Albany Law School and the SUNY Albany CEHC Informatics program.” Their Where to Start section may be helpful for thinking about developing a mutual aid network. 

  • Identify the issue

  • Note if any similar mutual aid networks are in geographical proximity

  • Ask some clarifying questions:

    • How far should our geographic reach be?

    • What resources do we have or need?

    • How can we build accountability?

    • Should there be a limit on how much help we give one person/family?

    • Can a group sustain itself if its members have different ideological approaches to the provision of aid, the purposes behind the group, and the way the group operates?

  • Create a pod to map individuals and resources (video)

  • Recruit help/volunteers

• More on pod mapping by the late disability justice advocate, Rebel Sidney Black. 

  • Includes a pod mapping worksheet, example questions for an introductory conversation (might be useful for survey questions), boilerplate invitation text. 

  • Related: This community mapping resource is intended for kids and may be a useful complement. 

• The importance of establishing community agreements (aka defining how to be with one another) are found through mutual aid literature.

  • We the People NYC has a community agreement, 

  • Montclair Mutual Aid has guiding principles, 

  • The Ready Together handbook features group agreements as the first order of business after scheduling a meeting (for more, see Disaster Preparedness Resources).

  • The Mutual Aid Disaster Relief Workshop Facilitation Guide features group agreements on pages 16-18. 

• Mutual Aid Disaster Relief is “a grassroots network whose mission is to provide disaster relief based on the principles of solidarity, mutual aid, and autonomous direct action.” Select resources below. 

  • The Resilience We Want: A Guide to Making Your Community Space into a Hub for Resilience and Mutual Aid (2019, PDF)

    • This companion to “The Response,” a documentary about community response to a disaster in Puerto Rico, focuses on creating a shared public space for mutual aid. The guide provides an outline for hosting a movie night in a shared public space to watch “The Response” by providing a series of structured conversation prompts based on six strategies. 

  • Comprehending Chaos: A Framework for Understanding Disasters, (2020, PDF) explores what happens in the aftermath of a disaster. 

    • Section 3 lists essential needs, which may provide a helpful structure for planning what’s needed in a community response. 

    • Section 4 lists catastrophe aftermath considerations that may be useful in a roleplaying activity or in group discussion.

    • Section 8 prompts discussion on elements of a grassroots response (e.g., mutual aid). 

    • Sections 11 and 12 look at social justice considerations.

  • Mutual Aid Disaster Relief Workshop Facilitation Guide (created 2018, Google Doc, 82 pages)

    • Provides tips, scripts, and activities for facilitating productive workshops. Many of the activities may be a helpful input for longer-term training and cohesion for neighborhood pod organizers. 

• The How to Neighborhood Pod (Google doc) guide by Mutual Aid Medford And Somerville (MAMAS) has helpful sections on:

  • How to build your pod 

    • A survey for those interested into volunteer as a neighborhood point person (NPP)

    • Tips for starting, naming your pod, building your pod (recommends 30 people max), and connecting with other pods. Includes some boilerplate text for reuse. 

    • A pod conversation guide with questions that might be repurposed for a survey. 

• Mask blocs provide masks, tests and other protective equipment to their communities for free. During the LA wildfires, mask blocs provided respirators and related resources to the community before any government agencies did. 

  • In New York, there are mask blocs in NYC, Long Island, Albany, Rochester, Syracuse, and Ithaca. Westchester does not have a mask bloc. This may be an opportunity to fill a gap. 

  • Related: In the Wild Fire Threat section of Irvington Green’s Emergency Preparedness page, there’s an opportunity to mention respirators (e.g., N95, KN95, KF94, FFP2) in addition to air purifiers as equipment that protects people from the harms of wildfire smoke. 

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation on mutual aid and data safety. 

  • Define your audience – Who are you trying to reach? How will you reach them? What will you ask them to do?

  • Collect as little data as possible – How much data do you actually need to accomplish your goal? What is most sensitive to your community?

  • Be mindful of permissions, and restrict access where possible – Does your data need to be public? What can you restrict to a smaller subset of your community?

  • Use encryption in transit and at rest – What tools are you using? Who can see your data? Is it protected?

  • Think about which companies, people and systems you’re trusting with this sensitive data

• #WeGotOurBlock Mutual Aid 101 Toolkit (2020)

  • Includes an introduction to mutual aid, how to build a neighborhood pod, lists of questions and needs, language for invitations.