Underdogs often respond to systemic oppression through collective care – acts of mutual aid and cooperation with the goal of meeting people’s basic survival needs when the state fails to do so. Some people feel collective care is just what we should do as decent human beings, but that it isn’t a strategy for systemic social change. Others are more critical, noting that collective care can turn people away from strategies to change systems through organizing and political action. But when we (Stephanie and Deepak) taught our graduate class on Power & Strategy, one of our students, Walter Barrientos, an experienced organizer in the immigrant rights movement, argued that collective care is a strategy that movements have used effectively for centuries around the world. The more we read and discussed the topic, the more we became convinced, and we included collective care as the 7th of our “Seven Strategies to Change the World” in our book, Practical Radicals.

In this episode, we look at collective care through the lens of the AIDS crisis and the remarkable work of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC). Our guest, Tim Sweeney joined and later ran that essential, underappreciated organization during some of the worst years when AIDS ravaged the LGBTQ+ community. After queer communities gained unprecedented visibility in the 1970s and early ’80s, AIDS brought despair and decimation. (By 1995, one gay man in nine between the ages of twenty-five and forty-four in the United States had been diagnosed with AIDS, and nearly 7 percent had died. By comparison, COVID-19 has killed 0.3 percent of the U.S. population.) GMHC encouraged gay men and their allies to turn their grief and anger into action to help the sick and dying (with their buddy program), fight bigotry and misinformation (with their hotline and safer sex education projects), and advocate for better policies at every level of government. Although the better-known ACT UP is sometimes seen as a more radical alternative to GMHC, Tim explains that the two organizations actually complemented each other — with the care and community building of GMHC providing a ladder of engagement that helped foster self-confidence and led many to take part in ACT UP’s headline-grabbing direct actions. In fact, as we discuss in the book, the first ACT UP meetings were co-facilitated by Tim Sweeney, and GMHC provided financial support to ACT UP at key points.

We conclude that collective care done well is a strategy that can make all other strategies, such as base-building and disruption, more effective. When opportunities for systemic change seem to be foreclosed, collective care provides a path for people to achieve tangible change – and often discover new ways to achieve social transformation.

Episode 10 transcript