24 THENEWYORKER,M AY18, 2020
Organizers hope that, after the coronavirus, we’ll expect more of one another.
ANNALS OFACTIVISM
CAN I HELP YOU?
The meaning of mutual aid during a pandemic.By Jia TolentinoILLUSTRATION BY NA KIM
W
e are not accustomed to destruc-
tion looking, at first, like empti-
ness. The coronavirus pandemic is dis-
orienting in part because it defies our
normal cause-and-effect shortcuts to
understanding the world. The source of
danger is invisible; the most effective
solution involves willing paralysis; we
won’t know the consequences of today’s
actions until two weeks have passed.
Everything circles a bewildering para-
dox: other people are both a threat and
a lifeline. Physical connection could kill
us, but civic connection is the only way
to survive.
In March, even before widespread
workplace closures and self-isolation,
people throughout the country began
establishing informal networks to meet
the new needs of those around them.
In Aurora, Colorado, a group of librar-
ians started assembling kits of essen-
tials for the elderly and for children who
wouldn’t be getting their usual meals at
school. Disabled people in the Bay Area
organized assistance for one another; a
large collective in Seattle set out explic-
itly to help “Undocumented, LGBTQI,
Black, Indigenous, People of Color, El-
derly, and Disabled, folxs who are bear-
ing the brunt of this social crisis.” Un-
dergrads helped other undergrads who
had been barred from dorms and cut
off from meal plans. Prison abolition-ists raised money so that incarcerated
people could purchase commissary soap.
And, in New York City, dozens of groups
across all five boroughs signed up vol-
unteers to provide child care and pet
care, deliver medicine and groceries, and
raise money for food and rent. Relief
funds were organized for movie-theatre
employees, sex workers, and street vend-
ers. Shortly before the city’s restaurants
closed, on March 16th, leaving nearly a
quarter of a million people out of work,
three restaurant employees started the
Service Workers Coalition, quickly rais-
ing more than twenty-five thousand
dollars to distribute as weekly stipends.
Similar groups, some of which were or-
ganized by restaurant owners, are now
active nationwide.
As the press reported on this imme-
diate outpouring of self-organized vol-
untarism, the term applied to these
efforts, again and again, was “mutual
aid,” which has entered the lexicon of
the coronavirus era alongside “social dis-
tancing” and “flatten the curve.” It’s not
a new term, or a new idea, but it has
generally existed outside the mainstream.
Informal child-care collectives, trans-
gender support groups, and other ad-
hoc organizations operate without the
top-down leadership or philanthropic
funding that most charities depend on.
There is no comprehensive directory of
such groups, most of which do not seek
or receive much attention. But, suddenly,
they seemed to be everywhere.
On March 17th, I signed up for a
new mutual-aid network in my neigh-
borhood, in Brooklyn, and used a plat-
form called Leveler to make micropay-
ments to out-of-work freelancers. Then
I trekked to the thirty-five-thousand-
square-foot Fairway in Harlem to meet
Liam Elkind, a founder of Invisible
Hands, which was providing free gro-
cery delivery to the elderly, the ill, and
the immunocompromised in New York.
Elkind, a junior at Yale, had been at his
family’s place, in Morningside Heights,
for spring break when the crisis began.
Working with his friends Simone Poli-
cano, an artist, and Healy Chait, a busi-
ness major at N.Y.U., he built the group’s
sleek Web site in a day. During the next
ninety-six hours, twelve hundred peo-
ple volunteered; some of them helped
to translate the organization’s flyer into
more than a dozen languages and dis-