Setting Up
Mutual Aid 101 – If you would like to set up a mutual aid group in your community, this toolkit includes step by step instructions for how you can build your own mutual aid network while staying safe from the spread of COVID-19.
Running Zoom – Remote meetings as a way to gather online
Tips on Handling Money in Mutual Aid
Exchanging Money – Tips on exchanging limited sums of money
Resources for how to do care safely – by Queercare – including sterilising protocol and safe food deliveries to immunocompromised people
Guide: Rules for Mutual Aid Groups – How to avoid “the tyranny of structurelessness” and set some common agreements for your Mutual Aid group
Safeguarding
Safeguarding is the mitigation of risks that come from interactions between people. Safeguarding is both for volunteers and for the people they’re supporting. Everyone should think through the risks of their actions when working with others.
Tools (Tech)
Coronavirus Tech Handbook – how to use online tech, working, leading alternative online events and isolation.
meet.coop (paid subscription) – cooperatively-run alternative to Zoom
Further Reading
- Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)
- Syllabus put together by Dean Spade for a course on “Queer and Trans Mutual Aid for Survival & Mobilisation” Full syllabus, reading list and discussion questions.
- Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster
- Marina Sitrin & Colectiva Sembrar, Pandemic Solidarity
- Victoria Law & China Martens, Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind: Concrete Ways to Support Families in Social Justice Movements and Communities
- Scott Crow, Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy, and the Common Ground Collective
- Jessica Gordon Nembhard – Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice
- The Revolution Will Not Be Funded is a very useful anthology about the problems with the non-profit industrial complex and how groups have developed some alternative approaches. You can read the introduction here.
- Symbiosis Research Collective- Community, Democracy, and Mutual Aid: Toward Dual Power and Beyond
- Kropotkin – Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
- Insurrection & Infrastructure: a Dual Power Guide for Leftists in Britain
- Cooperation Jackson- Jackson Rising Redux: Lessons on Building the Future in the Present