CZM Book Club: Mutual Aid by Dean Spade, Part One

Summary

It Could Happen Here – CZM Book Club: Mutual Aid by Dean Spade, Part One

A Podcast Summary by Cool Zone Media (Feb 1, 2026)

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Overview

In this episode of the Cool Zone Media Book Club, host Margaret reads and discusses selected excerpts from Part One of Mutual Aid by Dean Spade. The episode delves into the concept, history, and practice of mutual aid, framing it as a critical tool for survival and resistance—especially relevant amidst current crises like the pandemic, climate disasters, and state violence. Utilizing examples from history and contemporary activism, the reading illustrates how mutual aid is both distinct from charity and foundational to building and sustaining powerful social movements.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What is Mutual Aid? (From 02:27)

• Definition: Mutual aid is "collective coordination to meet each other's needs, usually from an awareness that the systems we have in place are not going to meet them."
• Highlights its roots in all large social movements, contrasting it with charity models.
• Mutual aid is participatory, anti-authoritarian, and liberatory, empowering those in need to also become organizers.
• “There is nothing new about mutual aid. People have worked together to survive for all of human history, but capitalism and colonialism created structures that have disrupted how people have historically connected with each other and shared everything they needed to survive.” (Margaret reading Spade, 07:41)

2. Mutual Aid in Practice: Historical & Contemporary Examples (12:00 – 18:00)

• Black Panther Party’s survival programs: Free breakfasts for children, clinics, and other services rooted in a liberation (not charity) framework.
• The Young Lords’ activism: Focused on Puerto Rican communities; included hijacking X-ray trucks, taking over hospitals, and garbage protests to address real needs.
• Indigenous and Black mutual aid traditions: Offering a counter-narrative to white supremacist and colonial histories.
• "The government's attacks on the Black Panther Party are evidence of mutual aid's power, as is the government's co-optation of the program." (Margaret, 18:28)

3. Why Mutual Aid Matters Now (03:10, 11:00)

• The present context—ICE raids, COVID, climate crises – underscores mutual aid’s urgency in filling government voids.
• Mutual aid is a vital on-ramp for people to join movements and resist isolation, stigma, and the failures of hostile systems.
• “More and more people report that they have no one they can confide in when they are in trouble. This means many of us do not get help... until the police or courts are involved, which tends to escalate rather than resolve harm.” (Margaret reading Spade, 09:40)

4. Three Key Elements of Mutual Aid (17:44 – 28:53)

1. Meets Survival Needs and Builds Shared Analysis

• Example: Black Panther Party—material needs met and a space for developing analysis about root causes
• Breaks shame and isolation, turns survival into collective action

2. Mobilizes People, Expands Solidarity, and Builds Movements

• Mutual aid as the solution to movement fragmentation
• Solidarity across identity, experience, and issue; avoids "innocence" politics that exclude the most marginalized
• “Solidarity across issues and populations is what makes movements big and powerful. Without that connection, we end up with disconnected groups working in their issue silos, undermining each other...” (Margaret reading Spade, 25:06)

3. Participatory Problem-Solving, Not Waiting for Saviors

• Everyone is invited to participate, not just receive aid
• Mutual aid projects build collaborative skills, confidence, and willingness to defy authority
• Ex: Post-Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico—organizers ‘took the bold action’ to redistribute hoarded supplies, emphasizing audacity and necessity
• “By participating in groups in new ways... we are both building the world we want and becoming the kind of people who could live in such a world together.” (Margaret reading Spade, 32:11)

5. Contrasts with Charity (35:00)

• Charity as expert-driven, top-down, and attached to eligibility and respectability
• Mutual aid: mobilizes many, resists exclusion, and builds movements for systemic change

6. The State Isn’t Going to Save Us (Chapter Three, 37:50)

• State responses in disasters often neglect the most vulnerable or serve elite interests; mutual aid offers people-driven alternatives.
• “What we build now and whether we can sustain it will determine how prepared we are...” (Margaret reading Spade, 41:20)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the urgency of mutual aid in crisis:
  “Crisis conditions require bold tactics. The contemporary political moment is defined by emergency—acute crises like the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change-induced fires, floods, and storms, as well as the ongoing crises of racist criminalization, brutal immigration enforcement, endemic gender violence, and severe wealth inequality threaten the survival of people around the globe.” (Margaret reading Spade, 03:21)

• On the link between meeting needs and growing movements:
  “Getting support at a place that sees the systems, not the people suffering in them, as the problem can help people move from shame to anger and defiance.” (Margaret reading Spade, 23:25)

• On boldness in action:
  “By taking bold actions together, we can imagine new ways of interacting with the world... even break norms and laws that enable individualism, passivity, and respect for private property.” (Margaret reading Spade, 34:51)

• On solidarity and sustainability:
  “What we build now and whether we can sustain it will determine how prepared we are for the next pandemic, the climate-induced disasters to come, the ongoing disasters of white supremacy and capitalism, and the beautifully disruptive rebellions that will transform them.” (Margaret reading Spade, 41:20)

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Important Timestamps

• 02:27 – Introduction to the Book Club and Mutual Aid
• 03:21 – The context and stakes for mutual aid
• 07:41 – Definition and essential context for mutual aid
• 12:00 – Examples of mutual aid in history
• 17:44 – The Three Key Elements of Mutual Aid
• 23:25 – The role of solidarity and political analysis
• 32:11 – Building new practices together, anti-authoritarian learning
• 34:51 – The necessity and possibility of bold collective action
• 35:00 – Mutual aid vs. charity: key differences
• 37:50 – The state’s limits and the necessity of relying on each other
• 41:20 – Final quote about the urgency and hopes for the future

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Tone and Style

Margaret’s readings are warm, energetic, slightly irreverent, and accessible, with asides and emphasis that encourage listeners to engage, act, and “underline things and say like yes.” The language alternates between Spade’s clear, practical advice and Margaret’s relatable, enthusiastic commentary.

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Final Notes & Recommendations

• The episode encourages listeners to explore mutual aid both in theory and practice—"go pick up a copy if you can, but also the PDF is up on the Anarchist Library."
• Next week: Part Two, focusing on practical advice for organizing mutual aid.
• Margaret links to further resources and conversations with Dean Spade—for more, visit deanspade.net or find the interview on Live Like the World Is Dying.
• Closing: “Stay safe, stay dangerous. Fuck ICE. I love you. Some of you. Maybe. Probably. Bye.” (Margaret, 43:19)

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Engaging and widely relevant, the episode is a primer on mutual aid for both seasoned organizers and newcomers seeking to understand—and act—in the collective struggles of our time.

Transcript

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Club Buh Club Book Club hello and welcome to Cool Zone Media Book Club, the only book club where you don't have to do the reading because I do it for you. Normally on here we read fiction, but we've been talking about doing some nonfiction and so we're gonna do it. We're gonna do nonfiction. This story isn't made up, it's factual. I don't know if it's factual. I don't know if it's built out of facts. Whatever. It is my absolute honor and delight to bring you some excerpts from Dean Spade's book, Mutual Aid. The whole book is absolutely worth reading. If you don't want to read a book called mutual aid that's from 1900, you can read a book called Mutual Aid that's from this very decade that we live in. It's a short, accessible, practical book full of really good advice for how to organize just about anything. Dean Spade's Mutual Aid and I know we're a little late for New Year's resolutions, but if your resolution this year was to get involved in an activist project, this book is a great guide. And we're not reading the whole thing. You still have to go out and get it, but we'll read useful parts of it. And it just so happened that the schedule landed this way. But it feels particularly poignant to do these episodes this week as we're watching people effectively fight off a full scale invasion of the Twin Cities at the hands of ICE agents. People are using underground networks of mutual aid to minimize the damage and fight back against this stuff. And so this reading that we're doing today speaks to you, and you haven't yet. You should check out our coverage of the rapid response and mutual aid networks that are coming out of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Me and James Stout went up there last week to cover those things and so both it could happen here and cool people who did cool stuff have content about that. Today I will be reading some excerpts from Part one of Dean Spade's Mutual Aid, which mostly covers what mutual aid is and some examples of how it has manifested within social movements. We'll do some excerpts from Part two next week, which has more just general good advice for organizing and and obviously we can't read the whole book here, but you should go pick up a copy if you can. But also the PDF is up on the Anarchist Library, which is a free site full of more reading than you'll ever be able to do in your life, honestly. But it has Dean Spade's Mutual Aid. Without further ado, Excerpts from Mutual Aid by Dean Spade Introduction Crisis conditions require bold tactics. The contemporary political moment is defined by Emergency acute crises like the COVID 19 pandemic and climate change induced fires, floods and storms, as well as the ongoing crises of racist criminalization, brutal immigration enforcement, endemic gender violence, and severe wealth inequality threaten the survival of people around the globe. Government policies actively produce and exacerbate the harm. Community inadequately respond to crises and ensure that certain populations bear the brunt of pollution, poverty, disease and violence. In the face of this, more and more ordinary people are feeling called to respond in their communities, creating bold and innovative ways to share resources and support vulnerable neighbors. This survival work, when done in conjunction with social movements making transformative changes, is called mutual aid. Mutual aid has been part of all large powerful social movements and it has a particularly important role to play right now as we face unprecedented dangers and opportunities for mobilization. Mutual aid gives people a way to plug into movements based on their immediate concerns, and it produces social spaces where people grow new solidarities. At its best, mutual mutual aid actually produces new ways of living where people get to create systems of care and generosity that address harm and foster well being. This book is about mutual aid. It explains why it is so important. What it looks like and how to do provides a grassroots theory of mutual aid as well as concrete tools for addressing some of the most difficult questions facing mutual aid groups, such as how to work in groups and make decisions together, how to prevent and address conflict and how to deal with burnout so that we can build a lasting mobilization that can win. Liberation Movements have two big jobs right now. First, we need to organize to help people survive the devastating conditions unfolding every day. Second, we need to mobilize hundreds of millions of people for resistance so we can tackle the underlying causes of these crises. In this pivotal moment, movements can strengthen, mobilizing new people to fight back against cops, immigration enforcement, welfare authorities, landlords, budget cuts, polluters, the defense industry, prison profiteers and right wing groups. The way to tackle these two big tasks, meeting people's needs and mobilizing them for resistance, is to create mutual aid projects and get lots of people to participate in them. Social movements that have built power and won major change have all included mutual aid, yet it is often a part of movement work that is less visible and less valued. In this moment, our ability to build mutual aid will determine whether we win the world we long for or dive further into crisis. We can imagine what is possible when we come together in this way by examining the response of Hong Kong's protest movement to COVID 19 in 2019, a massive anti government mobilization swept Hong Kong with People opposing police and seeking greater control over their lives. By the time the COVID 19 pandemic emerged, Hong Kong's Chief Executive, Carrie lam, had an 80% disapproval rating. Hong Kong's protest movement had escalated significantly, with protesters coordinating sophisticated mass mobilizations, including the use of bold tactics like fighting police with poles, projectiles, laser pointers and petrol bombs. Lam was remarkably non responsive to the pandemic. Despite the vulnerable position of Hong Kong, a densely packed city with a history of epidemics and a high speed railway connection to Wuhan, where the COVID 19 pandemic started. Hong Kong residents criticized Lam for her delay in closing the city's borders and her order barring city workers from wearing masks. But despite the government's failures, the people of Hong Kong, mobilized by the protest movement, launched a response that suppressed the original wave of COVID19 and mitigated its resurgence. On the day the first COVID19 case in Hong Kong was confirmed, people from the protest movement created a website that tracked cases, monitored hot spots, reported hospital wait times, and warned about places selling fake personal protective equipment. The protesters defied the government's ban on masks and countered misinformation from the World Health Organization, discouraging their use. They set up brigades that made and distributed masks, especially making sure they reached poor people and old people. They created a system of volunteers to set up hand sanitizer stations throughout crowded tenement housing and maintain the supply of sanitizer at the stations. They also created digital maps to identify the station sites. This essential mutual aid work was complemented by bolder strategies. When the government refused to close the border with China, 7,000 medical workers, as part of labor unions that had been formed during the protest movement, went on strike, demanding PPE and that the border be closed. Members of the protest movement threatened the government with stronger action if steps were not taken to address the epidemic and explosives were found at the border with China, possibly for this purpose. The Hong Kong government then created quarantine centers in dense neighborhoods, but never consulted the people in those neighborhoods. And the protest movement responded by throwing explosives into the quarantine centers before they were used, causing the government to change the location of the facilities to less densely populated holiday villages. As a result of these efforts by a mobilized and coordinated movement, and no thanks to the government, Hong Kong had an immensely successful response to the first wave of COVID 19. Through the combination of mutual aid and direct action to force concessions, the protesters did what the government would not do on its own, saving untold numbers of lives. This book provides a concrete guide for building mutual aid groups and networks. Part one explores what mutual aid is, why it is different than charity, and how it relates to other social movement tactics. Part two dives into the nitty gritty of how to work together in mutual aid groups and how to handle the challenges of group decision making conflict. It includes charts and lists that can be brought to group meetings to stimulate conversation and build shared analysis and group practices. Ultimately, I hope this book helps readers imagine how we can coordinate to collectively take care of ourselves even in the face of disaster, and mobilize hundreds of millions of people to make deep and lasting change. Part 1 what is mutual Aid? Mutual aid is collective coordination to meet each other's needs, usually from an awareness that the systems we have in place are not going to meet them. Those systems, in fact, have often created the crisis or are making things worse. We see examples of mutual aid in every single social movement, whether it's people raising money for workers on strike, setting up a ride sharing system during the Montgomery bus boycott, putting drinking water in the desert for migrants crossing the border, training each other in emergency medicine because ambulance response time in poor neighborhoods is too slow, raising money to pay for abortions for those who can't afford them, or coordinating letter writing to prisoners. These are mutual aid projects. They directly meet people's survival needs and are based on a shared understanding that the conditions in which we are made to live unjust. There is nothing new about mutual aid. People have worked together to survive for all of human history, but capitalism and colonialism created structures that have disrupted how people have historically connected with each other and shared everything they needed to survive. As people were forced into systems of wage labor and private property, and wealth became increasingly concentrated, our ways of caring for each other have become more and more tenuous. Today, many of us live in the most atomized societies in human history, which makes our lives less secure and undermines our ability to organize together to change unjust conditions on a large scale. We are put in competition with each other for survival and we are forced to rely on hostile systems like healthcare, systems designed around profit not keeping people healthy, or food or transportation system that pollute the earth and poison people for the things we need. More and more people report that they have no one they can confide in when they are in trouble. This means many of us do not get help with mental health, drug use, family violence, or abuse until the police or courts are involved, which tends to escalate rather than resolve harm. In this context of social isolation and forced dependency on hostile systems, mutual aid where we choose to help each other out, share things and put time and resources into caring for the most vulnerable is a radical act. And we can see again and again how mutual aid is a primary on ramp for people into resistance movements. Mutual aid tables and tents at protests and occupations of public space are the places where new people out in the streets for the first time seeking to join with others, often make their first contact. Contact people in crisis who find support through a mutual aid project, break through the isolation and stigma to connect with others who imagine that collective action is the solution. As more and more people become outraged by the compounding disasters, we need millions of entry points into resistance movements, and mutual aid is so frequently where people build those initial relationships and find a connection to the work. And nothing, by the way, connects me to the work like these goods and services. That's right, they just bring you right in to no, that's not true. Well, they're here anyway. Here's Ads.

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And we're back. Three key elements of mutual aid 1. Mutual aid projects work to meet survival needs and build shared understanding about why people do not have what they need. Mutual aid projects expose the reality that people do not have what they need and propose that we can address this injustice together. The most famous example in the United States is the Black Panther Party's survival programs, which ran throughout the 1960s and 1970s, including a free breakfast program, free ambulance program, free medical clinics, a service offering rides to elderly people doing errands, and a school aimed at providing a rigorous liberation curriculum to children. The Black Panther programs welcomed people into the liberation struggle by creating spaces and build a shared analysis about the conditions they were facing. Instead of feeling ashamed about not being able to feed their kids in a culture that blames poor people, especially poor black people, for their poverty, people attending the Panthers free breakfast program got food and a chance to build shared analysis about black poverty. It broke stigma and isolation, met material needs and got people fired up to work together for change. Recognizing the program's early success, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover famously wrote in a 1969 memo sent to all field offices that the BCP Breakfast for Children program represents the best and most influential activity going for the BPP Black Panther Party and as such is potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for. The night before the Chicago program was supposed to open, police broke into the church that was hosting it and urinated on all the food. The government's attacks on the Black Panther Party are evidence of mutual aid's power, as is the government's co optation of the program. In the early 1970s, the U.S. department of Agriculture expanded its federal free breakfast program, built on a charity, not liberation model that still feeds millions of children today. The Black Panthers provided a striking vision of liberation, asserting that black people had to defend themselves against a violent and racist government and that they could organize to give each other what a racist society withheld. During the same period, the Young Lords party undertook similar and related mutual aid projects. In their work towards Puerto Rican liberation, the Young Lords brought people into the movement by starting with the everyday needs of Puerto Ricans and impoverished communities. They protested the lack of garbage pickups in Puerto Rican neighborhoods, hijacked a city mobile X ray truck to bring greater tuberculosis testing to Puerto Rican communities, took over part of a hospital to provide health care, and provided food and youth programs for Puerto Rican communities. Their vision for decolonizing Puerto Rico and liberating Puerto Ricans in the United States from racism, poverty, and police terror was put into practice through mutual aid. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, many overlapping movements undertook mutual aid efforts such as feminist health clinics and activist run abortion providers, emerging volunteer run gay health clinics, childcare collectives, tenants unions, and community food projects. Although this moment is an important reference point for the contemporary left, mutual aid didn't start in the 60s but is an ongoing feature of movements seeking transformative change. Klee Benali, project coordinator at Indigenous Media Action, argues that mutual aid is an unbroken tradition among indigenous people across many cycles of colonialism, maintained through the traditional teachings that contemporary indigenous mutual aid projects are working to restore and amplify. Settlers have long worked to undermine indigenous peoples self sustaining practices by first destroying food systems and then forcing dependency on rations given at forts and missions and now by settler nonprofits. Indigenous mutual aid efforts are both a matter of survival and a powerful form of resistance to the forced dependence on settler systems. The long tradition of mutual aid societies and other forms of self help in black communities, which as early as the 1780s sought to pool resources to provide health and life insurance, care for the sick, aid for burials, support for widows and orphans, and public education efforts, is another important example. These efforts have addressed black exclusion from white infrastructures by creating black alternatives. Long traditions of mutual aid are also visible in working class communities that have long supported workers on strike so that they could pay rent and buy food while confronting their bosses. Perhaps most of all, the pervasive presence of mutual aid during sudden disasters of all kindsstorms, floods, fires, and earthquakes demonstrates how people come together to care for each other and share resources when inevitably the government is not there to help, offers relief that does not reach the most vulnerable people, and deploys law enforcement against displaced disaster survivors. Mutual aid is a powerful force. Two Mutual aid projects mobilize people, expand solidarity, and build movements. Mutual Aid is essential to building social movements. People often come to social movement groups because they need something eviction, defense, childcare, social connection, healthcare, or help in a fight with the government about something like welfare benefits, disability services, immigration status or custody of their children. Being able to get help in a crisis is often a condition for being politically active because it's very difficult to organize when you are also struggling to survive. Getting support through a mutual aid project that has a political analysis of the conditions that produce your crisis also helps break stigma, shame and isolation. Under capitalism, social problems resulting from exploitation and the maldistribution of resources are understood as individual moral failings, not systemic problems. Getting support at a place that sees the systems, not the people suffering in them, as the problem can help people move from shame to anger and defiance. Mutual aid exposes the failures of the current system and shows an alternative. This work is based in a belief that those on the front lines of a crisis have the best wisdom to solve the problems and that collective action is the way forward. Mutual aid projects also build solidarity. I have seen this at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a law collective that provides free legal help to trans and gender non conforming people who are low income and or people of color. I worked with the group from 2002 to 2019. Again and again I saw people come to SRLP for help because something bad had happened to them in a shelter, in prison, or in interaction with cops, immigration authorities, the foster care system or public schools. People seeking legal services for these problems would be invited to participate in organizing and become part of srlp, working on changing the conditions that had brought them to the group. As people joined, things were often bumpy. Members may have had some things in common, being trans or gender non conforming, for example, but also differed from one another in terms of race, immigration status, ability, HIV status, age, housing, access, sexual orientation, language and more. By working together and participating in shared political education programs, members could learn about experiences different from theirs and build solidarity across those differences. This changed and continues to change not only the individuals in the group, but the kind of politics the group practices. Solidarity is what builds and connects large scale movements in the context of professionalized nonprofit organizations. Groups are urged to be single issue oriented, framing their message around deserving people within the population they serve and using tactics palatable to elites. Prison oriented groups are supposed to fight for only the innocent or the non violent, for example, and do their work by lobbying politicians about how some people, not all people, don't belong in prison. This is the opposite of solidarity because it means the most vulnerable people are left behind, those who are upcharged by cops and prosecutors, those who do not have the means to prove their innocence, those who do not match cultural tropes of innocence and deservedness. This narrow focus actually strengthens the system's legitimacy by advocating that the targeting of those more stigmatized people is okay. This pattern of anti solidarity incentives and practices has been devastating for movements as in the next chapter. Solidarity across issues and populations is what makes movements big and powerful. Without that connection, we end up with disconnected groups working in their issue silos, undermining each other, competing for attention and funding, not backing each other up and not building power. Mutual aid projects by creating spaces where people come together on the basis of some shared need or concern in spite of their different lived experience, cultivate solidarity Groups doing mutual aid to directly address real problems in real people's lives tend to develop a multi issue and solidarity based approach because their members lives are cross cut by many different experiences of vulnerability. Sometimes even groups that start out with a narrow goal adopt a wider horizon of solidarity and a wider vision of political possibility if they use the mutual aid model. An initial goal of serving people impacted by homelessness quickly reveals that racism, colonialism, immigration enforcement, ableism, police violence, the foster care system, the health care system, transphobia and more are all causes of homelessness or causes of further harm to homeless people. Solidarity and an ever expanding commitment to justice emerge from contact with the complex realities of injustice. This is exactly how movements are built as people become connected to each other and as one urgent issue unspools into a broader vision of social transformation. But do you know how podcasts are built, dear listeners? Do you know that some of them, including the very podcast you're listening to now, are built on the dollars of advertisers for better and for worse. And here they are.

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[Margaret (Book Club Host)]

And we're back. 3. Mutual aid projects are participatory solving problems through collective action rather than waiting for saviors. Mutual aid projects help people develop skills for collaboration, participation and decision making. For example, people engaged in a project to help one another through housing court proceedings will learn the details of how the system harms people and how to fight it. But they will also learn about meeting facilitation, working across differences, retaining volunteers, addressing conflict, giving and receiving feedback, following through and coordinating schedules and transportation. They may also learn that it is not just lawyers who can do this kind of work and that many people, including themselves, have something to offer. This departs from expertise based social services that tell us we need to have a social worker, licensed therapist, lawyer or some other person with an advanced degree to get things done. Mutual aid projects always include an invitation to participate in any offer of support. People are invited to take a tent or water or food, but also to become part of the project. Getting material support from the Mutual Aid group isn't conditional on participating. You can have what we're giving out whether or not you come to our next meeting and join our protest at the landlord's office on Tuesday. But because Mutual Aid is based on an understanding that we won't solve the crises we are facing through just giving things to each other, we must organize as many people as possible to care for each other other and fight back. Any aid shared includes an invitation to become part of the work. Every person in crisis or need is also a person who can be part of transforming the conditions with others. Mutual Aid is inherently anti authoritarian, demonstrating how we can do things together in ways we were told not to imagine and that we can organize human activity without coercion. Most people have never been to a meeting where there was not a boss or an authority figure with decision making power. Most people work or go to school inside hierarchies where disobedience leads to punishment or exclusion. We bring our learned practices of hierarchy with us even when no paycheck or punishment enforces our participation, or even in volunteer groups where we often find ourselves in conflicts stemming from learned dominance behaviors. But collective spaces like Mutual aid organizing can give us opportunities to unlearn, conditioning and build new skills and capacities. 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. For example, in the Occupy encampments that emerged in 2011 to protest economic inequality, people shared ideas about how to resolve conflict without calling the police. Occupy brought out many people who had never participated in political resistance before, introducing them to practices like consensus decision making, occupying public space, distributing free food, and engaging in free political education workshops. Many who joined Occupy did not yet have a developed critique of policing. Participants committed to police abolition and anti racism cultivated conversations about why activists should not call the police on each other. This process was inconsistent and imperfect, but it introduced many people to new skills and ideas that they took with them long after Occupy encampments were dismantled by the police. Mutual aid can also generate boldness and a willingness to defy illegitimate authority. Taking risks with a group for a shared purpose can be a reparative experience when we have been trained to follow rules. Organizers from Mutual Aid Disaster Relief share the following story in their 2018 workshop facilitation guidelines to illustrate their argument that audacity is our capacity. When a crew of MADR organizers after Hurricane Maria traveled to Puerto Rico, some visiting their families, others bringing medical skills. They found out about a government warehouse that was neglecting to distribute huge stockpiles of supplies. They showed their MADR badges to the guards and said, we are here for the 8am pickup. When guards replied that their names were not on the list, they just insisted again, we are here for the 8am pickup. They were eventually allowed in, told to take whatever they needed after being let in. Once aid workers were able to return repeatedly, they made more badges for local organizers, and this source continued to benefit local communities for months. MADR asserts that by taking bold actions together, we can imagine new ways of interacting with the world. When dominant ways of living have been suspended, people discover that they can break norms and even laws that enable individualism, passivity and respect for private property. MADR asserts that saving lives, homes and communities in the event and aftermath of disaster may require taking bold action without waiting for permission from authorities. Disaster survivors themselves are the most important authority on just action mutual aid projects providing relief to survivors of storms, floods, earthquakes and fires, as well as those developed to support people living through the crises caused by poverty, racism, criminalization, gender violence and other. Quote Ordinary conditions produce new systems that can prevent harm and improve preparedness for the coming disasters. When Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, it was the existence of food justice efforts that made it possible for many people to eat when the corporate food system, which brings 90% of the island's food from off island sources, was halted by the storm. Similarly, it was local solar panels that allowed people to charge medical devices when the electrical grid went down. By looking at what still works in the face of disaster, we can learn what we want to build to prepare for the next storm or fire. In the Battle for Paradise, Naomi Klein authors that locally controlled microgrids are more desirable for delivering sustainable energy given the failures of energy monopolies that currently dominate energy delivery. In the wake of the devastating 2018 California fires, the public learned that the fires were caused by Pacific Gas and Electric companies mismanagement and then watched as California's government immediately offered the company a bailout, meanwhile failing to support people displaced by the disaster. Klein describes how large energy companies work to prevent local and sustainable energy efforts and argues that in energy, as in other areas of survival, we should be working toward locally controlled, participatory, transparent structures that replace our crumbling and harmful infrastructure. Doing so helps us imagine getting rid of the undemocratic infrastructure of our lives. The extractive and unjust energy from food health care and transportation systems and replacing it with people's infrastructure for social movements working to imagine and build a transition from dig, burn, dump economies to sustainable regenerative ways of living. Mutual aid offers a way forward. And that's chapter one. The author, Dean Spade continues in chapter two, which is called Solidarity Not Charity, and contrasts the ways that mutual aid is different to charity work. Actually, it's not called Solidarity Not Charity. It's called Solidarity Not Charity because there's an exclamation mark in the chapter. I'm sorry for having misread that. I'm terribly sorry quote. This is me reading from the book for a quote because yeah, we're only doing excerpts, but we're doing excerpts from part one today and we're going to do excerpts from part two next week. Anyway, from chapter two, quote Mutual aid projects in many ways are defined in opposition to the charity model and its current iteration in the nonprofit sector. Mutual aid projects mobilize lots of people rather than a few experts, resist the use of eligibility criteria that cut out more stigmatized people, are an integrated part of our lives rather than a pet cause, and cultivate a shared analysis of the root causes of the problem and connect people to social movements that can address these causes. And then in chapter three, we're all we've got. We're all we need. There's no exclamation mark there, but there could be. You could imagine one. It's chapter three. It's about a lot of different things, but mostly different examples demonstrating that the state isn't going to save us and we need to be brave enough to rely on each other if we want to make it through the many crises at hand. Mutual aid is only one tactic in the social movement ecosystem. It operates alongside direct action, political education and many other tactics. But it is the one that most successfully helps us grow our movements and build our people power because it brings people into coordinated action to change things. Right now, as mutual aid expands in the context of the COVID 19 crisis and climate change caused disaster zones and during economic crises, we have a chance to cultivate millions of new resistance fighters. To teach ourselves to work together in long term ways and to develop our ability to practice solidarity based co stewardship in all areas of collective life. Yeah, and so next week we'll get into part two and Dean Spade's advice for organizing on your own, whether that's a mutual aid project or something else. And I want to end on this last quote though, because it's just one of many beautifully succinct and motivational tidbits in this book. What we build now and whether we can sustain it will determine how prepared we are for the next pandemic, the climate induced disasters to come, the ongoing disasters of white supremacy and capitalism, and the beautifully disruptive rebellions that will transform them. Yeah, and Dean Spade's Bio Dean Spade is an organizer, writer and teacher. He has been working to build queer and trans liberation based in racial and economic justice for the past two decades. He is a professor at the Seattle University School of Law. He's the author of Love in a Fucked Up World. Well, actually it's an F asterisk C K E D upworld, but I think it's pronounced fucked. Another book called Normal Life and this book, Mutual Aid, which is getting an updated reissue from Versa with new chapters, updated case studies, and retooled writing for a new political context. Dean is also the host of the Love in a Fucked Up World podcast. You can keep up with his projects online at deanspade.net d e a n s p a-e.net or by following him on [e-mail] dean or bluesky eanspade if you like this reading, let me know that you want more like it because yeah, we mostly do fiction. You can find me Margaret on bluesky Margaret because I got Margaret because I was an early adopter. I didn't actually use it for a very long time, but I got Margaret Bsky app or whatever the fuck it is. You can find this book club on the feeds for it could happen here and cool people who did cool stuff. Or you can find it on its own feed with its own art if you like. Dean. I did an interview with him on mutual aid and disaster Preparedness on another podcast that I work on called Live like the World Is Dying, which you should also listen to. Hazel helps me with the scripts and research. Eva does her audio editing and that's it for us tonight. There's so much I want to say about this, but the episode's already running long because I wanted to get as much of Dean Spade's writing in. Honestly. Mostly I want to just like underline things and say like yes, but stay safe, stay dangerous. Fuck ice. I love you. Some of you maybe. Probably. Bye.

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