Mutual Aid

Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)

De: Dean Spade

Narrado por: Stephen R. Thorne

Around the globe, people are faced with a spiraling succession of crises, from the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change-induced fires, floods, and storms to the ongoing horrors of mass incarceration, racist policing, brutal immigration enforcement, endemic gender violence, and severe wealth inequality. As governments fail to respond to-or actively engineer-each crisis, ordinary people are finding bold and innovative ways to share resources and support the vulnerable.

Survival work, when done alongside social movement demands for transformative change, is called mutual aid.

This book is about mutual aid: why it is so important, what it looks like, and how to do it. It provides a grassroots theory of mutual aid, describes how mutual aid is a crucial part of powerful movements for social justice, and offers concrete tools for organizing, such as how to work in groups, how to foster a collective decision-making process, how to prevent and address conflict, and how to deal with burnout. Writing for those new to activism as well as those who have been in social movements for a long time, Dean Spade draws on years of organizing to offer a radical vision of community mobilization, social transformation, compassionate activism, and solidarity.

©2020 Dean Spade (P)2021 Tantor

So Good!

This book gives me hope in uncertainty! A must read for any young or old activist!! Keep loving, keep fighting

A Must Read!

The content of this audiobook made it fantastic! I can't wait to buy a hard copy. BTW , don't indicate that a headline is "optional" if it's mandatory to submit a review

An excellent primer on collective good

“Mutual Aid” is an excellent primer for anyone interested in collectively focused activism projects, and how you can get involved and how these organizations can operate in the midst of chaotic moments of upheaval, as we have felt in the past few years as society has felt the strained of this pandemic. Dean’s book is an excellent starting point for people who have felt passion and a discontent with the status quo our society seems to thrust on us and systems that are crushing people around us. Dean talks about the differences between government programs, nonprofits, and mutual aid groups and the pitfalls many groups stumble into when trying to do good work but inevitably falling prey to outside interests, fame, and - unfortunately - the corrupting matter of funding. He also outlines how people can come together to create their own mutual aid groups, establish ways of working and serving the people around them to fight oppressive systems. This is an excellent read for anyone who wants to get involved in mutual aid projects OR want to see how they can overcome the obstacles of nonprofit work in similar spaces. I give it 4 stars.

Very helpful

Clear and precise. Would recommend to all! Everyone will learn something new. Brief and incomplete but will prompt you to want to learn and do more. Organizing gets the goods!

great intro to mutual aid

this book helped me get up to speed on what mutual aid is and how to organize it

abridge this for audio format

If the company made an abridged version cutting out the long boring list of types of work and causes for burnout 3/4 of the way through, then this book would get 5 stars.
as it is, when you hit that slow-moving section that doesn't translate well to audiobook format, just skip to the next chapter.

surprisingly useful advice for work as well as MA

I was most surprised by how a lot of the advice in this book also felt applicable to work and not just mutual aid groups. Really enjoyed the book and learned a lot about MA, which was the goal!

Great resource to learn about mutual aid!

Great resource to learn about mutual aid, will be sharing with my peers in the fight towards liberation, abolition, and transformative Justice.

An ideal perspective but not entirely new

The author provides a number of examples on mutual aid's theoretical approach to collective organizing at a grassroots level while arguing the lack of efficiency at non-profit and public level emergency response.
The book provides a good structure for developing a mutual aid program, but is far too critical of hierarchical response models. While the ideal approach to organizing a group is rooted in a non-heirarchical model, it fails to place any value on existing response measures that, while perhaps not always perfect under duress, can provide essential support when time does not allow for extensive deliberation.
A focus on leveraging hierarchical systems in concert with grassroots lateral efforts, both in pre-emergency planning and during crisis response would be a good addition to this work.