What is it with people today?” my fellow volunteer said as they wrapped sets of cutlery up into napkins. A fourth person in as many minutes had tried to cajole us into letting them cut the line and just get dessert — cheesecake, highly prized. It was sunny but cold as hell, and the crowd at the food distribution that March afternoon was a little rowdier than usual. As I had taken my place as a platemaker, a fight broke out between two men at the back of the line. One of them produced a knife. Everybody started yelling. Organizers sprang into action, asking the man with the knife to take a walk and cool down. Soon we had moved on to our next problem: finding more forks. We ran out of cheesecake 30 minutes before the distro ended but no one left hungry. Everyone who wanted one got a plate of food, including the volunteers.
Everyone who wants a plate, gets a plate, is one way to describe the work of We the People, a mutual aid organization that started, like many others, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Their Brooklyn distro takes place on the sidewalk of Fulton Avenue, right off the Nostrand A/C stop in Bed-Stuy. The set-up is simple: a few tables with trays of homemade food dished out by volunteers, and some free clothing off to the side.
Mutual aid is a form of community care. Dean Spade, trans activist and founder of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, defines it as “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.” While mutual aid has taken many forms over human history, the phrase was mostly associated with anarchists and efforts like Food Not Bombs up until 2020, when it burst into mainstream consciousness as a response to the pandemic. We had to help each other because it was horrifyingly clear that the Trump administration could not and would not.
“It’s Hard To Get Your Ass Beat By The Cops Every Day And Then Go Feed People”
At its core, mutual aid is about survival. When the country went into lockdown, our most immediate needs were clear: We needed masks and PPE, we needed child care as schools shut down. We needed to put food on the table in a paycheck-to-paycheck world at a time when many people’s workplaces weren’t cutting any checks. In Brooklyn, where I live, neighborhood mutual aid groups sprung up everywhere, and volunteer armies appeared out of thin air. The anarchists were there, as they always are, but so were other types like the Brooklyn brownstone gentrifiers and the Googlers of Color and ladies with project manager energy. They were joined by Caribbean aunties, first-generation college graduates who’d been radicalized by student loan shock, and many other people with lots of nervous energy about the end of the world. For a while it felt like a not-very-small-at-all miracle that such unlikely gatherings of people could help many thousands of New Yorkers survive.
What distinguishes mutual aid from charity is that with the former, you are meeting each other’s needs without hierarchy (the haves and have-nots). Mutual aid efforts recognize that we all have needs and we all have something to give too, in this way you build real communal relationships. For people living in deeply rooted communities, those relationships are part of the landscape of the neighborhood. For neighborhoods ravaged by gentrification (like most of Brooklyn), mutual aid networks had real potential to connect people across race and class through the shared goal of not dying of the novel coronavirus.
It is certain that mutual aid has served a significant purpose as crisis response in the face of state negligence. What is less certain is whether the mutual aid networks we’ve built can help us go beyond crisis mode and become a tool for actually getting free of the exploitative structures of capitalism that undergird all of the basic functions of society. Take something extremely basic: food. We have to get out from under the system of industrial food production and distribution, but we still have to eat. This sort of freedom requires us to envision and build new systems to feed each other and to do it without exploiting each other.
At the We the People distro, I packed water bottles and cutlery and aluminum-wrapped plates into plastic bags for a line of low-income, mostly Black New Yorkers, feeling the warmth of doing good for my community. But I want more. I’ve come to believe that mutual aid can only build movement power when it escapes the cycle of crisis and becomes rooted in place and a clear revolutionary framework. I want everyone to get a plate, but after we’ve filled our bellies, I want us to revolt.
I was still, technically, at work in my downtown Manhattan office in March 2020 when I made a Canva graphic for a Covid-19 grocery fund. I was part of a small group called Abolition Action, and we’d done one previous “mutual aid” project — a rom-com night fundraiser to buy socks for people incarcerated upstate. Workplaces weren’t yet closed but we wanted to get ahead of what we knew was coming, so we decided to start a grocery fund for people who would lose wages while we rode out what we expected to be a few months of quarantine. We saw mutual aid as crisis response and abolitionist praxis; we saw it as a way to help our communities survive.
That fund raised over $45,000 in the two months it was active. We gave money directly to people who requested it and we also helped fund a grocery delivery organization, Corona Couriers. We struggled because corporate financial systems are not made for moving large, life-saving sums between individuals. My PayPal account was suspended. We maxed out our transfer limits on Venmo, Cash App, and Zelle, and had to develop a complicated system of passing money between accounts on a rotating basis. I got my first gray hairs. Everyone was so tired. By May 2020, we had shut down our fund and rolled our remaining requests into a new fund tied to the New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC DSA), which I took on the role of managing.
Then police murdered George Floyd, and we took to the streets as a collective. I began working on the Defund NYPD campaign with NYC DSA (a fool’s errand to get a mostly hostile city council to slash the police budget by half). My life was a cycle of screaming at the cops, fleeing the cops, doing jail support for those who were unsuccessful at fleeing the cops, and, on top of that, coordinating funds for groceries and household expenses. I held political education workshops and Zoom discussions on abolitionist practices, and every time I foregrounded mutual aid as a practice that can help us get free. But admittedly sometimes it felt like a version of that classic meme:
Step 1: start a fund
Step 2: distribute money
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Get free?
As the acute crisis of Covid-19 came to an end with the vaccine and the false promise of Joe Biden’s election, and many New Yorkers returned to work, both street protest and mutual aid efforts focused on resource redistribution began to contract. Organizer burnout was a big factor: It’s hard to get your ass beat by the cops every day and then go feed people. Some of my comrades faced serious charges related to our street activities. I had a stomach ache all the time from worrying about the thousands of dollars needed to keep feeding the dozens of families who relied on the fund I was managing. I shut the fund down in May 2021, having raised and distributed over $132,000. I felt an immense relief coupled with a deep guilt. The Covid crisis was apparently over, but the crisis of capitalism hadn’t budged at all.
I believed mutual aid could be more than just crisis response, but by the end of 2021 I could admit that much of what we’d been doing was just that — a scramble to keep each other alive in unforeseen and unprecedented circumstances. The potential power of mutual aid to transform social relations and build revolutionary power often seemed out of reach when the basic logistics of running funds (fundraisers, apps, bookkeeping) and distributing resources (groceries, deliveries, tabling) took so much effort. I still believed that mutual aid could build power and create community out of strangers, but that belief was somewhat theoretical. I had raised and distributed over $170,000, and almost everyone who was sustained by that money is still a stranger to me.
Some dialed back; some went deeper. Crown Heights Mutual Aid (CHMA) and Bed-Stuy Strong both began as small mutual aid groups doing direct resource distribution in the form of groceries or cash, much like Abolition Action. But since then, they have adjusted their models.
“It is purely a response to the realities of people’s burnout,” said Olivia Snarski, a member of CHMA, adding that they didn’t want to come across as negative, or hopeless. Olivia, who runs a group for white people to “deprogram” from whiteness (which they call an addiction), has an intensity paired with a penchant for gentle phrasing that makes them well-suited to their mutual aid work. “I think part of what people in CHMA and lots of mutual aid spaces believe is that it’s supposed to be a space where the joy and the friendship and camaraderie, and the community-building, and intimacy is supposed to provide a cushion. I think the way we organize even moves a fraction slower because there is an underlying hint of a culture of people worrying about one another as humans.”
They’re clear that resource distribution is important — “people can’t do work if they are hungry” — but there are simply not so many resources to distribute anymore. People have returned to work, leaving them less time to volunteer; budgets have tightened. The Pandemic Food Reserve Emergency Distribution, a program that allowed community groups to order up to $1,000 in fresh fruits and vegetables per month, ended in early 2023 (even as 2.8 million New Yorkers remain reliant on food stamps, or SNAP).
CHMA does have a few remaining recurring monetary donations, largely holdovers from 2020, but mobilizing people to resource distribution on a weekly basis is difficult for the group. The group still hosts events where people can get fed, such as their community potluck dinners at the First Church of Christ in Crown Heights, but these are typically one-offs.
Sasha Verma, a long-time organizer with Bed-Stuy Strong, said that a “huge challenge is moving through burnout from crisis response into building more sustainable structures.” There is the time commitment factor — in 2020, many people joined the organization when they were unemployed and had more time to give. Now it seems people are more overworked than ever, and if they show up at all, it’s just as bodies on a distribution line.
“A lot of people want to volunteer at our food distribution events and that’s it,” she told me in February in a phone conversation. “They don’t show up for our book club meetings or our abolition meetings. They’re mostly interested in showing up at the park to distribute food. How do we make it more? A lot of what we’re talking about is how to make things more mutual.”
“My long-term goal is revolution. My short-term goal is trying to get the community to keep itself safe”
She wants to create a membership structure that asks for more commitment in order to build a more explicitly political space. “The reality is most people were involved in the crisis stage of Bed-Stuy Strong,” she told me, “and more people started to drop out as we started to do more political education.” It scared them off, she thinks. She emphasizes that the group is committed to abolitionist politics and part of that is getting people to engage with that side of the work.
Both Bed-Stuy Strong and CHMA have turned their focus towards projects that need fewer people involved, and which target smaller numbers of people, but which go deep in building bonds. Bed-Stuy Strong is building out a program where members receive and distribute food with partners like Brooklyn Packers, a worker co-op that sources, packs, and delivers healthy local food. Crown Heights Mutual Aid is working on something they call Deep Care, in which members come together to provide complex assistance to another member. To take one example, a diabetic member living in a women’s shelter receives a regular meal train and meets with other members to get help with things like obtaining an ID, finding a job, and navigating her relationship with her social worker.
These modes of mutual aid are radically different from resource distribution, and both Sasha and Olivia emphasized that much of this work takes commitment. The payoff is huge, though. Olivia was emphatic that “anyone who is actually engaging in commitment around community nourishment is creating very real cross-racial and cross-class and cross-generational friendships. It’s a level of intimacy.”
Both of these groups provide models for how to move from crisis response to long-term community power buildings. It involves consistency and politicization. Much of the work isn’t so visible. But I still see both groups try to maintain some presence on the streets. My own group, the Crown Heights CARE Collective, has been spending our Saturdays at the library attached to our stomping grounds, Brower Park. Most of the time we see CHMA tabling outside or we pass each other on our way to our respective conference rooms. We smile and wave; we’re both still here, and that matters.
When you see the term mutual aid thrown around like a progressive synonym for charity, it helps to remember its roots — which are anti-establishment and anti-police. At the We The People distro in March, a passerby called the police to report the man with the knife. By the time two cops showed up, the issue had long been resolved. The cops, clearly nervous, quickly moved on as they were heckled by volunteers and people in line: “Go away, no one needs you here.” Everyone understood who their real enemy was, and it wasn’t knife guy.
Many mutual aid groups in the city are abolitionist, but We The People has always had a more revolutionary undertone. It was founded and is still led by 42-year-old Terrell Harper, a New Jersey native better known as Relly. Before the 2020 uprisings, Relly had not considered himself any sort of activist. Relly describes himself as someone who’s been in and out of the system, but at that time he was going through a rare period of not being harassed by cops. “I went three years without being arrested,” he told me in March, at a café just down the street from his distro. “I had got some money in my pocket but I wasn’t doing anything because I was working three jobs.” Relly said he wasn’t initially so shocked by George Floyd’s death — “we seen worse shit all the time” — but he felt compelled to take part in the protests after his two sons asked him to get a guard dog to protect them from the police.
He came to New York to join a protest near City Hall, and immediately got caught up in an action where cops kettled protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge. He ran from the cops, they chased him, he got away. He moved to Brooklyn and instantly became a magnetic presence on the protest scene. With his waist-length locs and unusual height — he’s around 6’4 — he stands out.
As the encampment that sprang up during the Defund NYPD campaign dwindled, Relly stayed on at City Hall, along with others — the recently radicalized, the anarchistically inclined, the homeless — who had no political home, trying to hold down the space and keep caring for each other. He took the $12,000 he had from savings and unemployment and used it to feed his comrades. By early 2021, Relly had founded his first protest group, Fire Artem (aimed at NYPD officer Artem Prusayev, known for multiple incidents of police brutality) and the mutual aid operation We The People.
Relly understands mutual aid as part of the way we get to revolution. It’s not all about the hype of the street protest; the other side is mutual aid as community-building that scaffolds our movement.
We have to be there as long as our people are out here
“My long-term goal is revolution. My short-term goal is trying to get the community to keep itself safe. That’s what we built over there at We The People. The people know in that line that they’re safe,” he said. “The houseless people, the mentally ill people, they know on Thursdays that if they come to that line we will take care of them. The ones that can’t stand in line know they can come up ahead of time and tell us. We’re building community with the community. These people in that line have been there for three years. They know each other. They protect each other. They tell new people ‘no we don’t act like that.’ The community is doing for itself.”
This notion, that we can keep each other safe without cops, is one of the essential pillars of abolition. It’s something I told community members over and over again during my time with Defund NYPD. When we held community conversations in NYC Housing Authority buildings in Crown Heights and Bushwick, we’d ask people what would really keep them safe. They often listed things like more lights on their street or better living conditions. When asked how they currently find safety, people would point to their neighbors. You can’t count on the cops to come in 15 minutes when you’re screaming for help, but you can count on your next-door neighbor.
Mutual aid and abolitionist organizing are both about world-building. The things we do must be proof of concept. They must show people the world we’re trying to build. It is a revolutionary activity.
Our world-building projects will need to be defended, something Relly knows intimately. Because Relly has a revolutionary rhetoric and a tendency to focus on individual officers — he knows a number by name and he will find out where they live — the NYPD has a particular vendetta against him. His Instagram page is full of videos of his arrests and cops going after protesters at his marches. This has trickled down to We the People: In 2023 the NYPD violently arrested Relly at a distro. But the police rarely come around to the Bed-Stuy distro anymore. As he says: “I’m not scared to turn up.”
And his people aren’t afraid to turn up with him. The militancy of the crowd at We the People is a result both of the material conditions people face — the people waiting in the distro lines are the Black and Brown poor that police terrorize — and the vibe organizers have cultivated through music, conversation, and speechifying. This vibe is very distinctly: Fuck the police.
The overt politicization of the distros has had results. The cops have begun to avoid Fulton and Nostrand when We the People is around. The group has nearly 8,000 Instagram followers, and unlike many other outfits has been able to keep numbers of volunteers high over the last few years. At every distro they take a photo of the volunteers; dozens of people show up week after week.
Relly chats with people in line, and encourages other volunteers to do the same — to start real conversations, if they want. With his infectious, impish smile, Relly is especially good at connecting the personal and the political at the distros. Especially in early days, he’d often fire up the megaphone for a spontaneous speech.
“Whatever I was talking about in my protest, whatever I was marching against, boom, I’m teaching that lesson to the crowd,” he said. “When I get on that bullhorn I tell people what’s going on in my personal life. When my grandmother died last March, I was right here the next day doing mutual aid and I told people that. This food you’re eating, these are recipes I learned from my grandma. You tell them what’s going on, they start telling you what’s going on.”
We the People’s growth is such that they’ve been able to expand from the original Bed-Stuy distro to two other locations. The first is in Harlem — another Black neighborhood fighting for its life against gentrification. The second is in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village, which has become a hub for young migrant men looking for work and sometimes a place to sleep. That distro is We the People’s attempt to meet the crisis of the moment: the 185,000 asylum-seeking migrants who have arrived in New York City over the last several years.
Floyd Bennett Field is at the ass end of Brooklyn. To get to the former airfield, on Jamaica Bay in Far Rockaway, you have to ride the 2 or 5 train to the end of the line in deep Flatbush, then board a bus that passes through a desolate stretch of highway barely elevated above the water. It takes over an hour to get there from bustling central Brooklyn, and almost two from Manhattan. Once you exit the bus, it’s a long trek from the highway, past the stately welcome center and along a good mile of empty pavement and one backroad before you reach the white tented migrant “shelter.” Around 2,000 people are being housed in FEMA-level tent conditions in the middle of what feels like an ocean of tarmac, right next to the literal ocean. You get the sense that Mayor Eric Adams would have housed them directly in the ocean if possible. This may still happen, as Floyd Bennett Field is prone to flooding. Despite that, a judge has recently upheld the legality of the shelter.
The networks built in 2020 have been buzzing with chatter as people try to figure out how to get supplies to Floyd Bennett. Mutual aid as crisis response is in full swing again. My collective organized a quick and dirty distribution at Floyd Bennett of clothing and diapers we had left over from our work in Crown Heights. But this crisis is different than Covid, and that’s making it harder to move past crisis mode. One of the biggest problems is that it’s very difficult to get people into permanent housing.
Olivia from CHMA said there are people in the group who want to help but “the nature of the living situations of our new neighbors is so uncertain and volatile” that it’s hard to know how to integrate migrant support into a hyperlocal group that is so strongly rooted in a particular place.
Relly admits that the migrant-oriented distro in Tompkins Square Park has been tough. Part of the problem is the residents of the East Village — largely white and monied — see the migrants more as interlopers than possible neighbors. The class and racial character of the neighborhood means “it’s not where we really wanna build.” He says that when he talks to white upper-class people in the Village they only have concerns about the cleanliness of the park, not the care of the people. “The only time I deal with them is when they come around complaining.”
It’s not just white people who see the migrants antagonistically, though. I’ve noticed in my conversations with some Black long-time New Yorkers a distressing amount of disgruntlement with migrants, complaints that they are getting “too many” resources and committing “crime.” They have interpreted Adams’s austerity politics as a zero-sum game, and redirected his fearmongering about their own people toward the newcomers. In March, a Black man was shot on the train with his own gun after he provoked a fight with a couple he believed to be migrants.
In order to create deep bonds between migrants and New Yorkers already struggling to survive, mutual aid groups will have to not only bring people together but also politicize and contextualize the overlapping crises that migrants and low-income New Yorkers face together. When people are deliberately placed at the physical margins of our society, the task is difficult, but as We the People and other formations show, not impossible.
It’s late March and people huddle together in groups of three and four on benches, waiting for the Tompkins Square Park distro to set up. They are mostly, but not all, Black men, African and South American migrants, some underdressed for the chilly weather. The organizers arrive in spurts — here, someone with the tables; minutes later, someone with a tray of food. Unlike other We the People events, this distro has no set menu and volunteers do not sign up beforehand to bring particular dishes. People are asked to just show up and contribute anything they can. There is a distinct sense of trying to make a little go a lotta way.
Tompkins Square Park is central, but still a little more off the beaten path than flashier Manhattan parks like Washington Square or Union Square. For the migrants staying there, this is clearly a trading post for information about work, resources, access to a real life in the city. Probably better opportunities here than at Floyd Bennett Field. But how long they can stay in the park without getting run off by the cops is unclear — the police have previously cleared the pre-existing unhoused population that congregates there. I asked Relly how long he thinks the migrant mutual aid distro will run, knowing he has doubts about the ability to build deeply in that neighborhood. Despite his reservations, he made it clear: “I’m going to stay there as long as there are Black people.”
I believe in that too. Despite the exhaustion of building out these networks against the constant grind and crises of capitalism, we have to be there as long as our people are out here.
Mutual aid can be transformative in a way that moves beyond crisis response and survival when it is consistent, militantly political, and when it creates community space out of a mere place. Three years on from my work with the fund, I have found ways to integrate mutual aid as a permanent part of my life and my organizing. For me, this means rejecting the transactional in my relationships while leaning into my obligations to others. I check in on my neighbors or they check in on me (Miss Judy calls me at 7 a.m. sometimes but that’s okay). I’ve helped pay other peoples’ rent and they’ve helped pay mine. I may not know all the names of the people I sent funds to three years ago, but I know that care outside of the state is possible — and because I know that, I can believe in a way of life that transcends what politicians like Eric Adams say is possible in New York City.
Relly says that after he got some clout in the activist scene from protesting in 2020, people would constantly ask him what’s next. What do we do?
He says that the number one thing we should be concerned with is “taking care of each other.” We’re at a café on Nostrand, steps from where the distro runs. He gestures out the window to all the people walking by.
“This is what’s next.”
Cheryl Rivera is an editor at Lux.
