Mutual Aid Groups Band Together to Feed Communities Through Crisis

Amid nationwide protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody, a story of solidarity found its way from near the city’s downtown into national media outlets. Tomme Beevas and Yoni Reinharz converted their restaurant Pimento Jamaican Kitchen, located in Minneapolis’s “Eat Street” corridor, into a donation center feeding protesters on the front line and other residents affected by demonstrations. They distributed critical supplies like water, masks, and gloves from donors to protesters, earned national coverage, and in turn felt support from locals who helped protect the restaurant from white supremacist threats. “We’re here to take care of the community,” the restaurant’s booking manager Scott McDonald told the Southwest Journal over the weekend. “We know that whenever there’s a war — like the war that’s being conducted against Black men in America — there are going to be hazards.”

Beevas’s and Reinharz’s efforts are just one example of a horizontal support system known as mutual aid. Mutual aid groups take a number of forms, but they are generally predicated on community members supporting each other, and aid that represents solidarity, not charity. While protests concentrate on police brutality against Black citizens, they have also channeled the energies of people in many cities to fight against a range of interrelated inequalities that affect communities of color, including food insecurity.

These networks have become vital during protests, both for protesters and communities at the center of demonstrations. Black Earth Farms, a Pan-African and Pan-Indigenous farming collective, is delivering food to anyone arrested, injured, or traumatized during protests in Oakland. The East of the River Mutual Aid Fund, launched by Black Lives Matter DC to distribute hygiene bags, sack lunches, and other necessities, has provided more than 55,000 hot meals to the community since its efforts began in March; as protests unfolded over the last week in D.C., locals poured money into the cause in solidarity. The 40-year-old Food Not Bombs, a network of independent collectives in 35 countries, distributes vegan and vegetarian meals in many American cities, where chapters have supported protests in a variety of ways, like live tweeting police dispatches.

Screencap from Food Not Bombs Bostn / Twitter

Together with community activist Cameron Whitten, Salome Chimuku runs the Black Resilience Fund, which provides Black residents of Portland, Oregon with funds to pay bills and buy groceries, among other daily necessities, and recruits allies to accompany Black shoppers on grocery trips. “When a lot of folks in the Black community aren’t even feeling safe to leave their homes, to have someone willing to go to the grocery store with you, or go for you, really helps ease some of the collective anxiety around being Black in public,” Chimuku says. The fund isn’t just providing people with groceries, but purchases and delivers favorite comfort foods from restaurants. “They’re not only getting stuff that helps them stay afloat, but stuff that nurtures the soul.”

Not far from Pimento in Minneapolis, a clean-up effort on Lake Street led by Bethlehem Baptist Church morphed into Support the Cities, a platform to connect locals in need with volunteers and aid. Many of those seeking support are families whose local grocery stores have been damaged. Pastor Ming-Jinn Tong, one of the group’s co-founders, points out the layers of inequity that could make it difficult to secure food, especially during protests and imposed curfews. “If you woke up Thursday morning and the grocery stores were on flames, what would you do? You’d just get in the car and drive to the next grocery store,” he says. “But what if you don’t have a car because you depend on public transportation? All the buses have stopped as well.”

Among a number of events Support the Cities has hosted on their Facebook page, a pop-up grocery pantry at Midtown Global Market drew thousands of donations. “A lot of people asked, ‘What food should we bring?’” Tong recalls. “And my question back to them was, ‘If you were in a place of suffering, if you were in a place of fear, what kind of food would you want to eat? That’s the kind of food you should bring. You should bring the best food. Not your leftovers, especially when someone’s hurting.’ Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Let’s make it that simple.”

Whether a group organizes over social media, GoFundMe, or digital spreadsheets, and even regardless of whether the term “mutual aid” is formally attached or not, horizontal support systems are critical in communities that cannot rely on government agencies or top-down non-profit organizations to provide aid. From Philly Mutual Aid to Mutual Aid Network LA, many new groups have popped up since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has also disproportionately affected communities of color.

“We’ve seen an absurdly underwhelming response from the state,” says Rodney Smith of Solidarity Supply Distro (SSD), a coalition of communists, anarchists, and socialists in Boston that formed after the novel coronavirus began to spread. The group delivers food to 50 households a week and distributes another 80 to 100 bags of food through weekly events in the South End. Smith says they help a diverse crowd of locals, but one unifying factor is people who have trouble accessing food assistance through state agencies. “Redistributing, so to speak, through donations, money that’s coming from wealthier parts of the state into the communities that need it, is something we’re just better at [than the government],” he says. “It shouldn’t be that way.”

That community-led organization has carried over directly into demonstrations. “Since one of our platforms as an organization is that we’re anti-racist, that it is very much part of our mission: to not only be out in the streets, but to materially support protesters,” Smith says. The group decided to reallocate a portion of funds to bring water, granola bars, and electrolyte tabs to demonstrators. “We were out there because that’s our wheelhouse, the intersection of a lot of our political points of action.”

“Direct action needs to be tied with mutual aid,” says Whitten, who has also helped deliver 600 meals a week for the past two months through a Portland program called Free Hot Soup. “Those who are most marginalized are the ones who know the system needs to change, but it’s really hard to get into the street, to get into the halls of power, to make those changes happen when you are struggling to make ends meet.”

Mutual aid also provides an outlet for anyone who has heard the call to action but doesn’t know exactly how to get involved. “A lot of people have reached out saying, ‘We don’t know what to do.’ We have to channel that,” Whitten says. Smith says SSD has also seen a spike in donations as the protests have spread. “There is maybe a conflation in the heads of the people who are doing a lot of the donating right now that, even though Black Lives Matter and George Floyd and police violence were the impetus for this new wave, there’s just a need to do right by your neighbors in a variety of ways.”

It is unclear yet what large-scale impact protests will have in cities across the nation, but when the news cycle moves on, there will still be a need for mutual aid. “We’re very mindful of the fact that these people we’re feeding now were also food insecure before COVID,” Smith says. “After COVID’s over the food insecurity will continue to be a problem.” Mutual aid organizations will likely need locals to step up for their neighbors far into the future, and structural changes in government are required far beyond that: One of SSD’s core tenets acknowledges that “mutual aid alone cannot resolve the crises of capitalism,” but that aid is a survival tactic allowing other organizing efforts to “raise the consciousness of the working class.” Mutual aid may not be a long-term fix, but it has the potential to strengthen communities and inspire new leaders from within.

“We’re currently living in a society that is fully reminding us every day that we’re supposed to follow and we’re not supposed to lead — and I don’t believe that,” Whitten says. “I believe that there are opportunities for all of us to lead in this work and work together to achieve our collective goals.”