__This article is written by Ali Kelly who has worked in various roles across the UK regional and national government and as a Government Innovation Fellow at the Government Performance Lab (Harvard Kennedy School of Government). __

Mutual aid has been described as ‘the radical act of caring for each other while working to change the world’.1_ _ Over the Covid-19 pandemic, an estimated 4,000 mutual aid groups sprung up across the UK to respond to the health crisis through community support.2 These groups were successful in reaching a wide range of local people and adopted a non-hierarchical structure and open-ended, flexible delivery approach, offering support to anyone who felt they needed it.3 Though there is variation across the structure of mutual aid groups, studies have drawn some common principles, namely: reciprocity, shared humanity, community-driven care and redistribution of resources.4

Though I have spent most of my career working on social policy within government, I am always interested in grassroots approaches to community care and have volunteered with several groups that draw on the principles of mutual aid. Working with these groups has led me to reflect on how public services can better facilitate communities to meet their own needs effectively and with dignity.

The greatest learning I have found from being in mutual aid spaces is that above all, it is not just what is provided by way of support. How support is provided and who decides makes all the difference.

So, how can policymakers support mutual aid?

Though it is important to recognise that a key feature of mutual aid is the community-led nature and lack of government involvement, there are significant opportunities for public officials to create conditions supportive of mutual aid practice. This article sets out several ways to do this:

1. Invest in policies that allow communities to thrive

Key lesson: Communities often lack access to resources and the time required to support each other. Public Officials should examine policies that prevent communities from supporting one another and ensure that policies promote community access to resources and capacity required.

Mutual aid is built on community. Too often public service intervention has served to disperse communities; either through relocation, family separation or incarceration. There are numerous policies and regulations in force that frustrate communities from supporting one another. To take a small example, whilst working on foster care policy in Michigan with the Government Performance Lab I was surprised to learn that in many states, independent foster carers receive financial support whilst family or community members willing to take the child, ‘kin placements’, are not entitled to any such payment.5 The result is that individuals from the community, who know and love the child, are often prevented from taking placement due to a lack of resources.

Such a policy not only conflicts with a large body of evidence demonstrating that children placed with kin will likely have better outcomes.6 It frustrates mutual aid, as it prevents communities from coming together to support one another in a time of crisis, and fails to include broader community networks in the decisions relating to care. By providing financial resources to kin and ‘fictive kin’ caregivers, equivalent to foster carers, communities can come together to provide support that a child requires.

2. Limit competition for resources and facilitate collaboration

Key lesson: Policymakers should consider how funding streams and commissioning processes can serve to divide groups and make communities dependent on small funding pots. By building long-term, stable funding and policies which enable grassroots groups to work collaboratively, policy can move towards a model that better supports mutual aid practice.

A key to mutual aid is enabling community members to share skills, grow experience and move between roles to make the whole stronger. Though most mutual aid initiatives start off building from resources existing within the community, in practice, many mutual aid initiatives draw from philanthropic or government funding.7 Funding for community organisations can often be short-term and is usually awarded via a competitive grant-making process.

💬 Let the author know how you think policymakers can support mutual aid groups by leaving a comment below

Over the past three years, the Mayor of London’s Violence Reduction Unit has piloted a new, place-based approach to tackling violence. The ‘MyEnds’ programme takes a novel approach to commissioning. Instead of pitting groups against each other to tender, local delivery organisations are invited to come together as a consortium to deliver a collaborative, hyper-local strategy to reduce violence within their particular areas. The Consortia receives both monetary support as well as resources to improve the capacity of service delivery, including specific funding earmarked for grassroots organisations. Strategic decisions relating to delivery are left to community organisations, with a heavy focus on broader engagement and co-design. Full disclosure: I currently work for the Mayor of London’s VRU but an independent evaluation of this work has demonstrated promising impacts and encouraging feedback from the community organisations involved.8 By coming together as a local team the individual organisations build legitimacy, influence and accessibility to broader decision-making processes within their local areas.

3. Create avenues for community ownership

Key lesson: Policy Officials can support models of investment and ownership which centre community voices, keep communities together and crucially, enable long-term initiatives which support collective decision-making processes.

As well as policies which keep communities together and programmes which support community organisations to collaborate, there is a need for a broader distributive framework which solidifies community decision-making and creates sustainability beyond political funding cycles.

There are multiple examples of communities building self-sustaining models. Enabling community ownership arrangements is key to keeping the power in communities. I’ve been impressed (not only with the excellent musical programming) but with the mission of ‘Sister Midnight’, a crowd-funded music venue, built on community shares which is set to open in Lewisham, South London next year. ‘The Detroit People’s Food Co-op’ is a a Black-led, community-owned grocery cooperative whose purpose is to provide improved access to healthy food and food education to Detroit residents. Meeting the needs of the community is achieved through the democratic control of the co-op by its members. In relation to housing and gentrification, the Community Land Trust in London supports communities to bid for land and links rents to local earnings. ‘Mixed Income Neighbourhood Trusts’ (MINTs), developed by Trust Neighbourhoods in Kansas City, creates a financial instrument which can be used by neighbourhoods to protect their area from the threat of displacement by developing a portfolio which is designed to use market-rate rents to preserve residents' affordable rents.

Conclusion

There is much public servants can learn from mutual aid. Indeed, the very need for the existence of mutual aid groups should prompt officials to take a hard look at their own service provision and its deficits. Government should not focus purely on the gap mutual aid has filled, but rather, on how to put in place the conditions that will support mutual aid and communities to thrive. We should consider these groups as a source of inspiration for an adaptive, community-led service delivery that builds capacity and resilience within communities and is agile in responding to needs. Though none of the above suggestions will remove all power imbalances between government and communities, if we strive for an inclusive government that radically cares, we should be shifting the dial towards structures that facilitate, rather than hinder mutual aid.

Done reading? Make sure to share your own thoughts about how mutual aid groups have supported your community or communities around you by leaving a comment below ⬇️

(Image credit: Unsplash)