[quotes] Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) - Dean Spade 2020

  

"Mutual aid projects work to meet survival needs and build shared understanding about why people do not have what they need." 

"Getting support through a mutual aid project that has a political analysis of the conditions that produced your crisis also helps to break stigma, shame, and isolation." 

"By participating in groups in new ways and practicing new ways of being together, we are both building the world we want and becoming the kind of people who could live in such a world together." 

"We are encouraged to be mostly numbed-out consumers, but ones who perhaps volunteer at a soup kitchen on Thanksgiving, post videos about animal rights on our social media accounts, or wear a T-shirt with a feminist slogan now and again." 

"Activism and mutual aid shouldn't feel like volunteering or like a hobby - it should feel like living in alignment with our hopes for the world and with our passions. It should enliven us." 

"They encourage reforms premised on the assumption that the systems we seek to dismantle are fundamentally fair and fixable. We have to refuse to limit our visions to the concessions they want to give - what we want is a radically different world that eliminates the systems that put our lives under their control."  

"Because of how capitalism controls the means for getting by - food, health, housing, communications, transportation - and how dependent we are on systems we do not control, it can be hard to imagine that we could survive another way. But for most of human history, we did, and mutual aid projects let us relearn that it's possible and emancipatory." 

"MADR's slogan is 'No Masters, No Flakes,' and it's a great summary of key principles for collective mutual aid work. This dual focus on rejecting hierarchies inside the organization and committing to build accountability according to shared values asks participants to keep showing up and working together not because a boss is making you, but because you want to." 

"Consensus decision-making is based on the idea that everyone should have a say in decisions that affect them." 

"For consensus to work well, people need a common purpose; some degree of trust in each other; and understanding of the consensus process; a willingness to put the best interests of the group at the center (which does not mean people let themselves be harmed 'for the good of the group,' but may mean being okay not always getting their way); a willingness to spend time preparing and discussing proposals; and skillful facilitation and agenda preparation." 

"When someone shows up to a mutual aid group for the first time, full of urgency about something they care about, and they do not understand why things are being done the way they are, or do not understand how things are being done, and do not have a way to share their opinions and influence what is happening, they are likely to leave. People come to contribute, but they stay because they feel needed, included, and a part of something." 

"In our culture, we get a lot of practice either going along with bossy people or trying to be the boss. It's time to learn something different." 

"Decision-making works better if, rather than anyone seeing it as 'my proposal,' we can see it as the group's proposal. That way we are less likely to become rigidly attached to one outcome." 

"Most of us avoid conflict either by submitting to others' wills and trying to numb out the impact on us, or by trying to dominate others to get our way and being numb to the impact on others." 

 "If we do work we care deeply about with other people, we will experience conflict because the stakes of the work feel very high to us, and that conflict is likely to bring up wounds and reactions from earlier in our lives." 

"Sometimes we are so used to feeling excluded that we tune into that familiar feeling quickly and easily, unconsciously looking for evidence that we are different or are being slighted or left out." 

"We live in a society based on disposability. When we feel bad, we often automatically decide that either we are bad or another person is bad... If we want to build a different way of being together in groups, we have to look closely at the feelings and behaviors that generate the desire to throw people away."