What do we owe each other?
Reflections on mutual aid, organizing, and future visioning
“We should have people keep receipts of what they spend money on,” said a white undergrad, who won’t be involved with us for long. She’s not an abolitionist, like many of us are. I suspect she wants to add to her resume that she volunteered at a prison once to aid in her law school applications.
“No way,” says either me or my formerly incarcerated colleague. We’re generally on the same page, so I can’t remember who pushed back first.
It’s winter in a small but high-ceilinged meeting room on the campus of Washington University in St Louis. A small group that will become the STL Re-entry Collective is throwing around the idea of creating a mutual aid fund to address some issues we’re having with the university. All of us were volunteers with or alumni of a college in prison program and struggling to figure out how to best support students leaving prison. We were running into roadblock after roadblock both from the Department of Corrections and from the university administration as we tried to expand the program to include re-entry support. We needed a memorandum of understanding to provide re-entry support inside (we were working on it, but it’d take months). We were blocked from fundraising for re-entry related projects (which the Chancellor later denied). So we began to brainstorm how to work outside of the system. The co-chair of the re-entry committee, a program alumnus who had been released from prison just months before, suggested direct cash assistance. “People leaving prison need money,” he said. Simple.
“The master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”
I often come back to this Audre Lorde quote from a speech she gave at NYU. The master’s tools are all the violent ways current systems of supremacy are maintained: hierarchy, scarcity, coercion, divide-and-conquer, binary thinking. If we attempt to use these tools to dismantle “the master’s house” (white supremacy, sexism, capitalism), we will be re-creating systems of violence – or at the very least, not dismantling them. Even if we achieve short term victories or survival, it won’t help us towards true liberation. How then, do we create new patterns of living? Of interdependence, agency, community, nurturing, consensus-based decision making?
When we were developing the mutual aid fund, we were intentionally creating something new to support people dealing with the failures and limitations of state-based reentry support and existing non-profit reentry support, and to deal with the limitations of the bureaucratic institutions we were working within.
State-based re-entry support is based on surveillance and control. Legal restrictions on housing, employment, voting, and government assistance means that it’s hard for people to find security and stability when leaving prison, even with family support. Technical violations – like missing a meeting, breaking curfew, being unable to pay fees – are a top reason for people on parole to be re-incarcerated (which I wrote about for Talk Poverty here). On top of all that, leaving prison can cost money: in many states, people must pay the state for their own parole or electronic monitoring.
Nonprofit re-entry support often isn't much better. Many nonprofits have policies that exclude the most vulnerable from accessing their service. For example, in St Louis, we were coming across organizations requiring participation in Christian church services, sobriety, a job or certain salary to receive services. And many organizations have restrictions from their funders on what they can spend money on, so couldn’t provide direct cash assistance even if they wanted to.
Mutual aid organizing is a threat to existing systems of power, evidenced by the federal and state governments explicitly outlawing mutual aid work, humanitarian work, and protesting.
Since 2017 – when protest movements for Standing Rock and Black Lives Matter were strong across the nation – dozens of states have criminalized protesting in different ways.
Border patrol agents have been seen sabotaging water and supplies left behind for migrants, and activists leaving them supplies have been arrested and fined for “abandonment of property.”
In Georgia in 2023, Attorney General Carr charged and indicted 61 people protesting the construction of Cop City (which, if built, would be the largest police training facility in the US) with RICO and domestic terrorism charges, equating organizers use of mutual aid, publishing of zines, and “anarchist ideas” with organized crime.
More recently, states and universities have taken a hard, pro-Zionist line and criminalized protesting against genocide in Palestine (and the Department of Education is currently investigating five universities for anti-semitism and “anti-American encampments”).
And this month, the city of Fremont, California criminalized “aiding and abetting” people living in homeless encampments, with a punishment of up to six months in jail.
This criminalization, surveillance, and repression will only increase during Trump's presidency, as indicated by the plans laid out in Project 2025.
“If you have come to help me you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound with mine, then let us work together.”
– Quote developed in the 1970s by an Aboriginal rights group from Queensland (often credited to Lilla Watson, part of the group, who also said this quote at a speech at the UN in 1985)
We ended up starting the mutual aid fund at a precipitous time – spring 2020. At the time, at the advent of COVID-19 pandemic, mutual aid organizations were popping up or expanding across the U.S. And people were eager to donate. Just weeks after we launched the mutual aid fund on social media, people began hosting fundraisers on our behalf, selling pottery, prints, knit goods, and volunteering their design skills to help us sell t-shirts.
Much of our conversations in our early meetings, before we even had a bank account and started fundraising, was on how the fund would be structured. Before we launched, we’d decided to expand our fund to be focused on anyone leaving prison during the pandemic, not just alumni of the college in prison program we were initially brainstorming support for. We met on a weekly basis and were intentional and deliberate in our “policies.” One of our core values was that formerly incarcerated people are experts in their experience and needs. We didn’t require “proof” of what people were spending money on because we didn’t want to replicate systems of distrust and surveillance. Because we had limited funding, we did have some intentionality on how we spent money. We made a collective decision to try to reach as many people as possible, but in a still meaningful way, so we didn’t give one individual more than $1,000 and we didn’t fund people more than once until we’d funded everyone (which never happened – our requests always outpaced our funding).
Though much of our work was managing the fund, we did reentry organizing in other ways as well. We created the first comprehensive re-entry guide for St Louis, and it was researched, written, and edited with currently and formerly incarcerated people. We collaborated with other organizations in Missouri for political organizing, like Missourians to Abolish the Death Penalty or the St Louis Bail Project (which closed in 2021).
The project had a lot of successes. In our first year, we distributed tens of thousands of dollars to over a hundred formerly incarcerated people for housing, medications, to cover intervention fees, and more. We built relationships with other organizers and social workers across St Louis. The reentry guide we created was available online, at every branch of the St. Louis public library, and at multiple non-profits. I’m proud of the work we did.
Yet our work felt like a short term, bandaid solution. We were never able to fulfill all requests. It was emotionally taxing to turn people down or give them less than they needed. As the pandemic wore on, people became less interested in regularly donating. The fund felt like a survival tactic in a time of crisis, more than a meaningful redistribution of resources. Not to mention, the organizers became burnt out. Mutual aid work is hard, hard work – not only the fundraising aspect, but the emotional aspect.
Despite increased criminalization of protest and mutual aid, in general, the public, media, and even politicians celebrate acts of mutual aid: coming together as a community to fundraise or create distribution of food and other goods in moments of disaster like the pandemic or, more recently, the fires in LA. These short-term acts of community are thought of as humanity at its best. Yet we struggle to conceptualize how to build systems off of these same principles or to continue these acts as a means of solidarity and systems change. How can we best sustain mutual aid organizing outside of moments of disaster? What realities were we bringing into being? What systems were we continuing to reinforce?
I don’t have an answer to these questions. But I do know that no matter what I do, I struggle to feel like it is enough.
When I worked for a member of Congress, I felt disconnected from community and distant from peoples' lived realities. I wanted to return to community-based work. Yet when I worked in direct service for a college in prison program, it felt like not enough. Sure, I could build relationships with landlords, support people getting degrees during and after incarceration – but there was roadblock after roadblock, policy after violent policy that I could not control. How did I balance being encouraging and not giving people false hope? Then I began mutual aid work, and it was again not enough. Now we were able to work outside the limits of some systems and provide people with direct cash assistance without discrimination and unnecessary bureaucracy, but we were still dependent on people with extra income to want to give their money (and give money again and again). And now I’m a PhD student. Research is important, I think. Research, if well done and accountable to communities, can change policy, create interventions, and improve people's health. Or, it can be published in an academic journal that no one will read and be censored by the state. And what about writing? When I write, particularly for a magazine or newspaper, I reach a much broader audience than I could ever reach with academic research. Writing is certainly witnessing, but is it doing? (What does it mean to do? Serious question).
In 2021, I spoke on a virtual panel with organizers from across the U.S. called “Building Power & Solidarity during Losses.” I spoke about my experience with reentry mutual aid organizing in St. Louis, Adrienne Evans spoke from United Vision for Idaho, Viri Hernandez spoke from Poder in Action, and Joe Saunders from Equality Florida. I took some notes from the panel that I still find useful:
Focus on long term movement building and culture shifting, not just winning a campaign. Ask yourself: does this build power for our movement? Does it build leaders? Is this changing the cultural narrative? A campaign and policy gain should be a means to an end, not an end in itself.
Organizations should avoid creating "empires" where they do all the work, but half ass it (for example – doing voter mobilization and electoral campaigns and mutual aid and youth programs and and). Recognize what your role and expertise is in a movement; this can help build coalitions of power instead of diluting your work and value. I think this can apply to individuals as well. We don’t need to – and literally can’t – do everything. Where are our skill sets and passions?
Build a work and organizing culture that reflects your values and what you want to see in the world. Give each other grace and accept grace. The moderator Paxton noted:"Your work is community care. You are part of the community."
This reminds me of a resource I recently came across, the In It Together: A Framework for Conflict Transformation In Movement-Building Groups created by Interrupting Criminalization
I often find myself unsure how to end Substack posts about organizing. I have questions and reflections on what I’ve learned, but very few solutions. My thinking will, hopefully, continue to evolve over time as I continue organizing, strategizing, and being in community with people more brilliant and creative than I am. The work I do will change over time, but as long as I’m doing something and you’re doing something (and we’re both doing multiple somethings), we’ll force the needle further toward liberation.
Shout out and thank you to Harvey, Kennedy, Ronelle, Natasha, Jami and JJ, co-leaders of the mutual aid fund.