Hi everyone! I’m new here, so perhaps I have missed a resource on the forum that can help me with this and I hope it is OK to post this question. Since a few months I have been helping to run a mutual aid page on Instagram that takes requests from all over the world. A few things have struck me in the past months while working on this:
The majority of requests are coming from Black people in the US.
We have very few white American followers.
Most of our followers are young (18-24), Black/Brown/Indigenous/Asian, queer, neurodivergent, or otherwise marginalised.
Basically, it looks to me like funds are being passed around within a group of people that already has little wealth to go around, and I think we need to get more wealthy white Americans to donate. I frequently donate to homeless people in the US that we get requests from myself, but as a Dutch person it does feel odd to have to be sending funds to literally the richest country on earth because Americans don’t take care of their own. I was wondering whether people on this forum have any experience getting white, wealthy, older generations on board? Thanks!
Isn’t the whole point of mutual aid societies that they are made up of relatively similar people all helping each other out? This means that all can benefit, and they can use their knowledge of each other’s circumstances to provide more appropriate assistance. What you’re looking for sounds much more like traditional charity, which is indeed dominated by wealthy people. I recommend checking out GiveDirectly. They target the poorest people, and are probably also better equipped to prevent the misuse of funds.
I’m not sure it’s key to mutual aid that people are similar demographically, I’d say the key point of it is to share resources unconditionally. A traditional charity does not give unconditionally, as they gate-keep who is or isn’t ‘deserving’ enough of help (that’s not to say that traditional charities can’t do great work of course). Mutual aid also recognises that different people’s needs might be different: one person might need financial assistance to avoid eviction, another might need a second-hand mobility aid, and another might need a hot meal brought over a few times a week. So the aid is mutual, because the same people might be recipients of some types of aid and givers of others, if that makes sense.
GiveDirectly makes unconditional cash transfers so that sounds like what you are looking for?
I don’t really have an answer, but do you think this is a trend in mutual aid generally? (ie, that mutual aid networks are generally dominated by less wealthy and marginalised people) Anecdotally, I was in a UK-based mutual aid group and the admin made the same claim. It’s possible though that your group and my former group just arose in online ‘bubbles’ that were dominated by these poorer demographic groups, and maybe there are other mutual aid groups where more wealthy folks do join and contribute.
Thanks for your reply! I’m definitely noticing this in all the mutual aid spaces I’m involved in, and what concerns me the most is that most followers are very young (18-24 years old)! Obviously, these are not the kind of people that are able to commit to for example donating $100 to someone in need on a monthly basis. What I’m not sure about is whether this is because the networks I’m involved in are mostly based on Instagram, or whether it’s a trend in mutual aid networks in general. Social media is ideally positioned to connect wealthy folks with those in need, though, and it doesn’t seem to me that many wealthy white suburbanites are going out of their way to establish mutual aid networks offline locally. If somebody knows of a specific example of a mutual aid network in which wealthy white donors are predominantly active, though, I’d be super interested to hear about it!
I’ve been having discussions around adjacent topics with my (much more lefty, less priviledged) partner. Some thoughts, on the callous end:
Answer #1: Work with the system. Find some way for poorer and richer people to both gain from working together. This probably looks like commerce, like trade that both parties benefit from, and like indoctrinating/helping the members of your network acquire the skills and stances to be more “productive members of society”.
Offer richer people something they value in return. Richer people are likely to have less time for stuff; is there some way you can exchange the time of poorer people in exchange for something richer people want? In the normal neoliberal system, you have [personal assistants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_assistant); would people in your network be happy to have that kind of job?
Offer both rich and poor people a way to engage in mutual exchange in a way that doesn’t feel exploitative or demeaning to poorer people, nor potentially risky for richer people. Risk for richer people might be: agreeing to a trade but then the other party being flaky, things becoming too personal, them being judged for not doing enough, etc.
Can you structure an exchange between poorer people and richer people as exchanging mentoring for loyalty? Poorer people get skills and a patron, richer people would get someone they can trust.
Some rich people are also neurodivergent, and have poor social skills. It’s possible that you have people in your network that could help with poor social skills.
For richer people, the neoliberal system is already working in their favour, so for many things they can hire someone to help them out. You could do the hard work of making a mutual aid society be *better* than the neoliberal alternative. For example, maybe a richer person could trade with the mutual aid society a whole, instead of with any one particular person? Maybe the mutual aid society as a whole can take jobs on platforms like Upwork, or Fiverr?
For programming bootcamps, sometimes you have the structure that the bootcamps are free, but that they get some fraction of participants’s salary after they get a job. Is that structure something you could consider?
Answer #2 would be something like subvert the system, ignore the system, abandon the system, think in terms other than trade. I don’t currently have any specific, actionable ideas of how this could look, and in the meantime, you might want to give a thought to ideas from Answer #1.
Best of luck.