Mutual aid efforts grow in Boulder County and across the country

In this world, there are winners and there are losers. It’s survival of the fittest, and only the strongest survive. By this point in our collective history, we’re all pretty familiar with these concepts of social Darwinism, pitting strong against weak, everyone competing for the same limited resources. But what if there was another way?

Just a few years after Charles Darwin passed away, Russian anarchist and naturalist philosopher Peter Kropotkin proposed a counterargument to social Darwinism in a series of late-19th-century essays. He argued that humans and animals alike are naturally collaborative, not cutthroat. Our survival depends on working together, not competing against each other. It’s what Kropotkin called mutual aid, and it’s driven social movements throughout history. It also sees a resurgence in times of collective crisis, like the moment we currently find ourselves in.

There has been a proliferation of mutual aid groups across the country as the COVID-19 pandemic has changed life for all of us. These often small, localized networks have organized primarily on social media, offering to meet the needs of people within their community in the most basic and tangible ways. Folks are volunteering to buy and deliver groceries for people, pick up prescriptions, check in on loved ones if people can’t leave their homes. They’re offering free childcare, pet care and elder care. Sometimes, what’s offered is as simple as dropping off a book to give people something to do while they’re stuck at home or hopping on a video call so people don’t feel quite as isolated and lonely. It also encompasses calls for rent and eviction strikes, as well as organizing to make demands of existing systems like paid sick leave and safe working conditions. All of it is volunteer-based, all of it comes without eligibility requirements. There are no strings attached.

“One of the positive impacts of this time is how mutual aid is being popularized,” says Matthew Duffy, who recently started the Boulder COVID-19 Mutual Aid group on Facebook. “Hopefully it’s not hijacked and co-opted because it’s really important to recognize that mutual aid is solidarity. It’s not charity.”

This is a common mantra among mutual aid organizers. They distinguish themselves from other religious and nonprofit charities, as well as social service agencies that often have eligibility requirements people must meet in order to access services. These systems, they argue, are based on a volunteerism model that fails to question why people are poor or marginalized. It doesn’t recognize systemic inequity or the root causes at play.

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