The Mundane Work & Semi-Miraculous Power of Mutual Aid
A story of a community and a bike
I’ve probably repeated these lines dozens of times in the last month and hundreds of times in the last decade:
There are infinite ways to fight. People tend to focus on (and glorify) the frontline protestors who face off in the most visible and visceral way against fascism and state terror. But not everyone can or should be in the streets.
And these are words I believe in my core.I love a direct action but most of my work these days is focused on mutual aid. If I can do anything with the various platforms I have available to me right now it would be to widen the aperture of what is considered “the work” of fighting for a new world.
Mutual aid covers a broad range of activities literally too numerous to name - in part because mutual aid work is characterized less by the”what” and more by the how (through collective effort, reciprocal relationships and trust) and the why (a shared understanding that our systems are insufficient to meet our collective needs).
According to Dean Spade,
"Mutual aid is collective coordination to meet each other’s needs, usually from an awareness that the systems we have in place are not going to meet them."
Part of the difficulty in expanding what people view as “activism” is that it is incredibly hard to share what mutual aid looks like with a wider audience.
I can only speak for myself but I've struggled to share what mutual aid looks like for me. First because I work with a lot of vulnerable and marginalized people who deserve privacy but also are entitled to share their own stories. Second because sharing “my work” feels incredibly self-centered given that this work isn’t about me. Third, because the nature of my particular mutual aid work is often quiet, behind the scenes work (shlepping goods across boros, locating and redistributing resources, accompanying people to medical appointments or court dates) or incredibly sensitive (supporting comrades dealing with trauma, participating in accountability processes, safety planning for femmes in danger).
For all these reasons we don’t have a lot of examples in the public sphere of what mutual aid can look like beyond bigger projects (meal distributions, disaster recovery) or crowdfunding campaigns. And I have been at a loss of how to tell stories that illustrate the beauty and potential of mutual aid.
BUT I want to change that by tell you the story of a bike…a bike that provided an unhoused couple with economic stability.
The Scene
Let me first set the scene. It is spring 2022. Eric Adams - the newly inaugurated Mayor of New York City and a corrupt veteran cop — has launched a war on homeless people. City agencies including NYPD are “sweeping” both larger encampments as well as an areas where individuals and couples have been reported to 311 or spotted by cops. Correspondingly a collective of concerned activists and community members have come together to defend unhoused people.
In some cases this sweep defense work looks like the militant defense of encampments where residents are committed to holding the space. These instances are getting headlines and resulting in arrests including several mass arrests. But most of those who are getting sweep notices - which are posted at the site of encampments 1-2 days in advance by the Department of Homeless Services - are choosing to relocate to avoid police interaction and risk losing their belongings. As a result most sweep defense work is unseen: connecting with people who have sweep notices, conferring with them about their options, offering support with moving, connecting people to resources they need to survive outside, etc.
It is in this context that our collective connected with a couple who I will call Jay and Flora for purposes of anonymity. They had received a sweep notice which was spotted by a collective member and reported to the group. We were eventually able to make contact and after checking in with them they decided that they wanted to defend the space and were willing to risk arrest to do so.
So we did what we do: we mobilized our collective and two dozen community members showed, a small contingent of press and some other friendlies to show up in support of Jay and Flora.
The Morning of…
The morning of the sweep we convened with coffee and awaited the arrival of the cops and sanitation trucks. Jay - as he warned us - had to duck out for a quick job interview nearby. He returned a half hour later, reporting that the delivery job was his but required a bike.
I heard the need for a bike and mentally filed it with a list of to-dos that included getting the couple a working phone and a handful of other supplies. As we waited for a face-off it slowly became clear that the cops would not be coming - at least not at the time we expected.
At this point in the history of sweep defense we were playing a less-than-fun game of cat and mouse with NYPD trying to conduct sweeps. They’d no-show in the morning only to do a surprise sweep when residents went out later (effectively stealing all their belongings). While we were deciding how to proceed, a social worker quietly mentioned to Jay and Flora that his employer had an adversial relationship with Dept of Homeless Services but had been able to negotiate housing for unmarried but emotionally bonded couples in city-funded “Safe Havens.” These rooms were often converted hotel rooms with a private bathroom, maybe a fridge and a few amenities not typically seen in city shelters. It was enough of an improvement over sleeping outside or being separated at a shelter that Jay and Flora decided on the spot to take the offer. After a few calls and some time elapsing Jay, Flora and the social worker loaded into a car to check out a Safe Haven with an open room.
Our collective dispersed. BUT a comrade-photographer JP who had heard Jay mention their job interview and quietly went to work on locating a bike.
Bouncing Between Boros
Roughly two weeks later I got a DM from JP who, by then, was reporting from out of town. In the intervening weeks JP had contacted Riders4Rights, a NYC-based activist biker group. After Riders4Rights shared Jay’s request for a bike, several members had stepped up to offer bikes. JP asked me to follow-up on the offers since they were out of the area and tied up in work.
JP shared a list of roughly a half dozen offers of different sizes and types of bike with contact info for the offeree. After conferring with Jay on his height, I reached out to Emily (also a pseudonym) who had an appropriate bike in Williamsburg. Emily confirmed the bike was still available and made plans for me to come to Brooklyn and pick it up.
Emily also warned that the bike probably needed a tune-up as it hadn’t been ridden in a while. Emily and her partner Mark helped me load the bike in a car to take back to Manhattan. I learned they had a toddler and the bike was previously well-loved and well-used but no longer fit their growing family’s need. After chatting, I realized they had generously offered the bike without knowing where it was headed. I shared the most basic version of Jay and Flora’s story and thanked them for their contribution to the couple’s future security.
Back in Manhattan, the bike sat in a car trunk for a day or two while I contacted a friend in the neighborhood who is known to be handy. Cyrus (yes also a pseudonym) met me on a corner one sunny morning and helped me unload the bike.
They looked it over and confirmed it could be into bought back to good working condition. Then took it to their place for a slightly more extensive tune-up.
Cyrus then passed the bike off to Jay and Flora’s social worker in lower Manhattan. The bike was taken out to Queens where Jay and Flora had settled into a Safe Haven.
That bike did go on to provide work for Jay who started making deliveries the following day. We eventually used sweep defense funds to get Jay both a phone and a back-up battery to keep him online during long days of deliveries.
I don't want to overstate the importance of this bike but it was truly a lifeline and a critical source of support for the couple as they adjusted to their new home and worked to get stable.
What can we learn…
Not every mutual aid story wraps up with such a tidy ending. Indeed often in mutual aid work, we don’t necessarily see the full impact we have on each other. And though I shared where the bike was headed with Emily and Mark and I did gratefully circle back to JP, they didn’t get to “see” what I did: months and months and months of stability for Jay and Flora.
Still I love the story of this bike because it truly was a community effort. We have people in our communities with resources they do not strictly need (Emily and Mark and their spare bike). Sometimes these are goods like the bike Emily and Mark were able to offer. But sometimes the resources are financial.
During our sweep defense work (even today) we are supported by a broader community who have contributed funds. These funds have allowed us to replace items stolen by police, cover food for residents, pay for jail support and court support expenses related to encampment arrests and so much more.
This flow of resources from over-resourced to under-resourced is an important aspect of my work - in part because I operate as someone who lives at the intersection of two worlds: those in my community who live outside / are unemployed / underemployed / disabled AND the world I came from: White, highly educated, securely housed, upper middle class to affluent. For this reason I am uniquely positioned to facilitate redistribution, but I’d also argue that redistribution underpins a lot of mutual aid work - not all for certain, but a lot.
It takes some coordination, communication and even a bit of old-fashioned generosity but together we CAN get resources from those who have to those who need.
All of the folks mentioned in this story were necessary but no one person was sufficient to make this happen. One person activated a network of people and located the needed goods (in this case the bike). One couple had the goods. Three people were needed to transport the bike between various points on its journey between Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens. One person restored to bike to full working condition. All necessary but alone insufficient.
Our communities are rich with skills that can be linked in ways that subvert the usual transactional or capitalist ways of doing business. Cyrus took lead on tuning up and making small repairs to the bike. But along the way I contacted another friend who couldn’t do the tune-up but had contacts at a local repair shop. That friend thought the shop would do the work for free or at a low cost, but ultimately the possibility of paying for services that I knew existed in our community led me to reach out to Cyrus instead. In the process, I ended up getting a tutorial on how to patch a tire. Repair / handy person type skills are especially helpful in mutual aid when the work is redistribution. But I’ve seen other examples of skill sharing as mutual aid and community empowerment:
Chainsaw workshops in prep for post-storm/disaster recovery
Bike repair clinics and workshops for deliveristos
Wheelchair repair skillshares (esp important for disabled kin who depend on mobility devices and cannot afford to give up their devices for periods of weeks or months or pay for out of warranty service)
Mutual aid is as much about how you make people feel as what you do for each other. While the focus of this story is a bike. Notice that several dozen mobilized to support Jay and Flora. Many of us continued to stay in contact and indeed I have had periodic contact in the intervening years since this story - sometimes when they needed help and other times when they were reaching out on behalf of others who needed various forms of support. Knowing you are cared for and that there are people you can call in moments of need is powerful for a lot of folks - but especially those who are not well supported by any other systems.
Mutual aid is community. Mutual aid is care work.
Mutual aid is an experiment in world-building.
The work itself is NOT glamorous; in fact much of it is fairly mundane (I’ve joked that my role in the revolution is ‘schlepper for a cause’). But hopefully this small vignette illustrates that the impact is undeniable. My hope in sharing this story is that others who may not be deeply involved - or involved at all - in mutual aid work may consider doing so.
Resources for Getting Started or Going Deeper in Mutual Aid
“Mutual Aid by Dean Spade” - Please buy this short book from your local -Black-owned or Indie bookstore. This book provides some fundamentals - among the most important of which is non-hierarchical, reciprocal relationships of care and a connection to shared struggles for liberation.
Find a Local Mutual Aid Project
DM the helpers! There's a Mr Rogers quote I love: "When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ To this day, especially in times of ‘disaster,’ I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world." Maybe not in Mr Rogers' day but now many of the "helpers" are on Instagram, Twitter, Bluesky. If you seen people doing things, reach out! there are humans behind these accounts that would welcome your support.
Look on mutualaidhub.org. I love a directory and this one is solid place to start especially if you are interested in food security. The world is moving fast though, so as newer projects coalesce it may be hard to get the latest in your community from this centralized resource.
Get Inspired
“Liberation is the work and the work is liberation. There is no one answer to how we get free — there are one million.”
- One Million Experiments
All of our work is to some extent experimental and improvisational. That is scary for some folks used to more certainty. If you’re “some folks” get comfortable with the uncertainty and embrace your imagination. I especially like the One Million Experiments project which shares stories of various mutual aid and community projects from transformative justice to reproductive justice.
Start a New Mutual Aid Project
You do not necessarily have to be an experienced organizer to start a mutual aid project in your community. That said it will almost always be quicker and more impactful to build on an existing effort than start a new one from scratch. But if you know there's a gap in your community then definitely step TF up! This article has some ideas and guidance but I also recommend using Dean Spade’s book as a starting point for planning before launching something new.
This story made me so incredibly happy. The sharing of it in itself is mutual aid.