June 2024
Charles Bursey hands food to children at the Black Panther’s Free Breakfast Program.
Photograph courtesy of Pirkle Jones and Ruth-Marion Baruch.
Dear friends,
In January 1969, leaders of the Black Panther Party did something that some people thought was both radical and threatening: they organized a free breakfast for children in an Oakland neighborhood. They solicited donations from local businesses and recruited volunteers to help prepare and serve breakfast for kids in their neighborhood.
The Free Breakfast for Children Program soon expanded to other chapters of the Black Panther Party across the nation. The program served as a cornerstone of the Black Panther’s Survival Programs—including services like Sickle Cell Anemia Testing, Free Ambulance, and Legal Aid— which intended to help Black communities meet their basic needs in the absence of government support and services. Many experts agree that the successful Free Breakfast for Children program helped prompt the federal government to create a free breakfast program that is still in operation today.
The Free Breakfast for Children Program is an example of mutual aid where communities build their own systems of collective care. Dean Spade is one of the key thinkers (and doers) writing about mutual aid. He describes it this way: “Mutual aid is a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions…Providing for one another through coordinated collective care is radical and generative.” In Spade’s writing, he emphasizes that mutual aid is not charity, it is partnership with other community members to build a shared understanding of why people’s basic needs aren’t met, expand solidarity, and ultimately solve community problems through collective action. Mutual aid is not a new concept, it has long been used by marginalized communities to work together to meet basic needs when they have been excluded from economic, political, and social systems that would otherwise have provided for those needs.
Mutual aid is one of the ways that we can make a better world possible. It is an approach that enables us to focus our energy on building the world we need rather than merely critiquing the world we have. A mutual aid approach urges us to ask: how can we build systems within our own communities to meet people’s needs? Likely, there are already mutual aid activities going on in your community. How can you learn more and get involved? In my local area, there is a group called the Mutual Aid Network of Ypsilanti that organizes supports like a food pantry and a pull-over prevention program which helps people, especially immigrants and people of color, make vehicle repairs (e.g. fixing a taillight) to help them avoid being targeted by law enforcement.
It is also important to remember that mutual aid does not need to be large-scale to have an impact. It can be as simple as a few neighborhood families coming together to share after school childcare responsibilities or creating a neighborhood volunteer bank for neighbors who need assistance with a ride, picking up medications, or minor home maintenance. How can you come together with other community members in a spirit of sharing to work against the sense of isolation and individualism that is so pervasive in our society today? Mutual aid gives us a framework to start building towards a better world of collective care that will enable us all to thrive.
Take care and build systems of collective care,
Paul
Today’s Key Point:
We can start building systems of collective care in our community in small and large ways; mutual aid provides a framework for how to build towards making a better world.
Today’s Reflection Questions:
What are examples of mutual aid (or systems of collective care) that you are already involved in?
What is a need in your community? How could mutual aid help provide needed resources to address that need?
What do you have that you can share with your community? (e.g. extra stuff you don’t need, a skill, time, etc). How could you make this available to people in your community?
When you share or give away your resources, do the people who are most in need have access? How can you bring them into your network of sharing/giving?
Quote of the Month:
“Every moment is an organizing opportunity, every person a potential activist, every minute a chance to change the world.” — Dolores Huerta
Inspired reading/listening/viewing:
Mutual Aid Hub, website to look for mutual aid organizations across the country
Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, documentary film