“We’re real people doing this work”: The role of mutual aid as community care in the climate crisis

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, communities across the US saw a resurgence of mutual aid networks, informally organized to provide residents access to essentials like healthcare, housing, and groceries, as well as psychological support. In the absence of sufficient public responses, pre-existing community organizations, self-help groups and new mutual aid networks attempted to repair a fractured social landscape from “the bottom up.” Mutual aid networks, and other voluntary community organizations, provide alleviation from the material impacts of crises but also act as bridging institutions by creating horizontal linkages among individuals, increasing social capital and community solidarity, as well as platforms for concentrating and amplifying the interests of vulnerable and often underrepresented voices. Scholars have highlighted the importance of social capital and infrastructures to successful local climate adaptation efforts, and community resilience. In this project, we 1) synthesize literature on the history of mutual aid, and related networks of care, and their response to severe weather events and disaster response, 2) introduce a taxonomy of the diverse types of care and labor that these networks perform in the context of climate adaptation, and 3) examine if and how these networks work in cooperation or tension with existing state and third-sector organizations. We draw on interviews and surveys with community groups from the New York and Los Angeles metro areas to inform these analyses.