All products are independently selected by our editors. If you buy something, we may earn an affiliate commission.
The coronavirus pandemic is setting in across the United States. As the number of COVID-19 cases rise (with our collective anxiety), calls over the weekend to take the situation seriously were met with photos of busy restaurants in major metropolitan areas and logistical nightmares at airports, situations that could potentially spread the novel coronavirus in large group settings.
The global pandemic has spurred government action in areas with big outbreaks. In countries like China and Italy, massive lockdowns are getting results in stemming the spread of the disease, but also raising concerns about the potential for authoritarian governments to overstep.
President Donald Trump’s administration has struggled to respond effectively to the situation, and his record of overstepping his executive authority has many experts concerned that a federal response could lean on authoritarian tactics.
So how can we all take steps to look out for one another? How do communities already vulnerable to the glaring shortcomings of our political and economic systems ensure their own survival during a pandemic? An early answer, that’s arisen in the last week, is a tactic long used by activists and organizers: mutual aid, a term that simply refers to people helping one another.
We’re seeing this response to coronavirus from ordinary and high-profile people alike, with recent news-making moments of celebrity philanthropy offering us a model we can look to. Take Megan Thee Stallion’s “Suga Spree,” where she offered financial support to her "hotties," singer Lil Nas X did the same thing; and 19-year-old NBA rookie Zion Williamson is one of several basketball players who are stepping up to keep arena staff paid after the NBA shutdown.
Not everyone has the resources of music’s hottest stars or the biggest names in sports, and even as celebs do their part, everyday people are leading the way to discovering how to help out one another. To find out what that looks like, Teen Vogue spoke with people organizing in response to the coronavirus crisis, who are showing us the power of mutual aid in real time.
How are people providing mutual aid in light of coronavirus?
There has been an explosion of organizing in response to the pandemic. Online, organizers have put together a slew of resources through social media and Google Docs. Hearteningly, there is too much activity to cover effectively in a single report like this, but a fairly exhaustive list is available here, and you can likely find more information by checking in with activists or on social media in your area.
For the purposes of this piece, we’re focused on two kinds of organizing: local efforts to build networks that can respond at the neighborhood or community level and efforts to build networks to serve more at-risk groups, like the immunosuppressed or -compromised, incarcerated folks, and workers who will be out of jobs.
Walela Nehanda, who uses they/them pronouns, has started two lists to facilitate aid to people with weakened immune systems: One list enables people who need help to ask for it and another enables people who can provide help to offer it. They told Teen Vogue that they personally have advanced stage leukemia and are looking for a stem cell donor for a lifesaving bone marrow transplant.
“My partner had spent a few days searching for this Lysol disinfectant spray we always use, but it was sold out everywhere in Los Angeles, online, and the times we could find Lysol, it was being price gouged,” Nehanda said. “I became so scared because this is one of many products I need every day, but especially now in the midst of a pandemic. I went on Twitter and just asked for help. Within 10 minutes, two people were willing to help me out and send Lysol to me.”
“Even after I said my needs were met, people were still offering to help me, so I decided to start a thread on Twitter where people who were immunocompromised could list their needs and people in areas still with disinfectant products could send them out,” they continued. “It became so much bigger than anticipated that I created two Google docs that have since been circulating and have been connected with other mutual aid documents and efforts, creating a national network.”
Google’s online suite of tools has become instrumental in community response to coronavirus. As seen in this list from the Anarchist Agency and activist Cindy Milstein, Google Docs and Forms are giving people a quick and easy way to ask for or offer help, and to share information and resources all over the country. That’s the case with NYC United Against Coronavirus, a Google Doc that organizer Andy Ratto told us is, in part, a chance to network neighborhood-level efforts in New York.
“I'm working with a loose coalition of friends in New York City who are starting at the building level,” Ratto explained. “When it begins moving to the neighborhood level, it becomes more challenging for people to discover what it is that's going on nearby and [to] offer themselves up in terms of assistance or [to] request help. So this project that I'm working on is one step to be able to connect people to those resources which are coming online and being mobilized throughout New York City.”
“What has been inspiring is the local organizing that I've seen in response to coronavirus,” Ratto said. “We're seeing these community organizing efforts come online, from the perspective of people saying, ‘How can I help?’” Whether that aid comes in the form of money, material goods, or volunteering, Ratto said, it’s all coming from a place of helping one another and can be quite simple measures.
“We need people to pick up pizza and coffee,” Ratto said. “And that's something that might not necessarily be intuitive to a lot of people who are used to maybe showing up to a protest for two hours, where you hold a sign and you do some chanting, you do some marching, and then you go home.”
Ratto said part of the point of having a document like the one he’s organized is that, in many cases, there may be systems in place that can benefit from the outpouring of support that seems to be materializing, helping to refocus brand-new efforts in ways to bolster existing social infrastructure.
“There's a robust system of food pantries throughout New York City because people facing food insecurity is not new in New York City,” Ratto explained. “And that's another lesson, as well, that people can take on within their communities: Look to the organizations and the organizers who have been doing this work prior to coronavirus.”
“Directing people to the existing institutions can be very helpful,” he added. “Identifying what exists already and matching up that capacity and that need is one way, I think, to move us all forward.”
For some, the institutions that already exist are, unfortunately, part of the problem. Advocates fear that’s the case for people who are incarcerated in our criminal justice or immigration detention systems (not to mention those in refugee camps), who find themselves in high-risk situations during a pandemic. That’s why Survived and Punished New York, a grassroots prison abolition group, organized a soap drive for inmates, in the hopes that they can provide incarcerated people with potentially lifesaving hygiene supplies.
“We decided to send soap because we had heard from several comrades in prison that this was something they were lacking, and something they were concerned the prison commissary would sell out of,” said Eliza Petty, a member of the group who uses they/them pronouns.
“The soap drive has done even better than we expected!” they shared in an email sent March 15. “Our initial group of five people set a fundraising goal of $900 to send to approximately 60 comrades incarcerated around New York State. One of our Twitter posts went semiviral within a few hours of posting it, and within 72 hours, we had raised over $6,000. At this point, we're connecting with other grassroots organizers around the country to help distribute these funds to more people.”
Petty's advice for anyone interested in joining a similar effort, they told Teen Vogue, is “anyone who wants to organize or help out with similar efforts, I say go for it! … A lot of organizing right now is happening online, so do a little research to figure out who's out there doing the work you care about, and plug in! Even better, ask a couple friends to do it with you." However you want to get involved, remember to do so with the best available public health guidance and keep any local provisions like lockdowns in mind.
All three of these examples showcase actively crucial work amid a pandemic. Just as importantly, these activists are demonstrating mutual aid in a way that can remain significant moving forward. To examine why this all matters, let’s look at the concept of mutual aid.
What is mutual aid?
Mutual aid is basically a fancy term for helping each other. For an intellectual perspective on it, we turn to the anarcho-communist writer and thinker Peter Kropotkin, who wrote in his 1902 text, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, that the concept is foundational to our systems of survival.
“It is not love and not even sympathy upon which society is based in mankind,” Kropotkin wrote. “It is the conscience — be it only at the stage of an instinct — of human solidarity.” Kropotkin went on to argue that society is based on “the close dependency of every one’s happiness upon the happiness of all” and “the sense of justice, or equity, which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own.”
The organizers we talked to seemed to agree that this moment of crisis is also a time when communities can come together and be stronger than ever.
“In times like these ... it's important to transform our relationships and practice community care via mutual aid,” Nehanda said. “Disabled people are often not thought about or valued, especially in times like a global pandemic, when we are the most vulnerable.”
Petty told Teen Vogue, “We have the ability to organize ourselves and build the infrastructure to get what we all need when the state and formal institutions fail to do so.”
Ratto pointed out that “secondary impacts,” like people being out of work, under quarantine, socially distant, and other social and economic disruptions, will be as much a part of the crisis as the health impacts.
“We can all start small," Ratto said, "with the people who live on the floor of our apartment, or the people who live next door and across the street from us on our streets, and check in and exchange contact information.”
“There's nothing new in America about people not being able to work, being laid off or not having a job, or not having access to food, or not having access to reliable transportation, or facing any of those problems,” Ratto continued. “It's important to keep the mindset moving forward, [and] that the lessons we learn from this about how communities can take care of each other and how neighbors can come together [are] a potential solution to some of the hardships of coronavirus, but also a potential solution to some of the hardships that will continue to exist.”
Editor's Note: A misspelling Walela Nehanda's last name as "Nehand" has been corrected.
Stay up-to-date on the 2020 election. Sign up for the Teen Vogue Take!
Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: The Coronavirus Could Change Everything, So We Need to Take It Seriously
