Mutual Aid Is Good – Why Is Mutual Agreement So Hard?

The effect of mutual aid is obvious: it is the active practice of reciprocal care, when everyone contributes to help each other for the common good. What seems so darn tough is to get to the mutual agreement part – everyone agrees there is a problem and everyone agrees to contribute to the solution – that must be the foundation of mutual aid.

Here is when it looks like a no-brainer.

The Love Fridge in Chicago is a mutual aid network that places community refrigerators in neighborhoods to feed neighbors who need food, stocked by neighbors who have food to donate. There are almost 25 mutually-used fridges in the city!

This is not a hand out or “haves-helping-have-nots” – because on any given day, the receiver is also the giver! In fact, The Love Fridge’s motto is, “Take what you need, leave what you can.” Mutual need, meet mutual supply.

The demand (and expectation) for mutual aid in a society has been obvious for multi-millennia. St. Paul instructed the Corinthians 2,000 years ago:

”… now at this time your abundance may be a supply for their want, that their abundance also may be a supply for your want: that there may be equality…”

Here is when mutual agreement + mutual aid saves lives.

During the gun violence and chaos at the supermarket in Boulder, Colorado on March 22, shoppers ran away from the gunmen, searching for safety. Employees looked for shoppers to aid – to hide them in closets and lead them to exits. Customer Ryan Borowski described the scene:

“Everybody kind of had like a hand on another person, you know. Somebody had their hand on my back, I had my hand on someone else’s back, and we just kept moving.”

Can we keep moving from here?

Atlanta and Boulder in one week! Can we agree there is a problem to solve? (Fact is, there are multiple problems to address in gun safety, let’s begin by finding the ones we mutually agree with.) Can we agree that we all must contribute to the solution? (Too often disagreements are framed as one side giving up too much, and the other side taking it all away. What is each “defender” willing to offer to the other?)

Here’s a start.

There is probably mutual agreement that we all desperately want these tragic killings to stop. Good start. Next step: Are we willing to offer a hand to each other with some aid, some abundance – so we can find the exit out of these tragedies into a safe place for all?