Mutual Aid Will Not Save Us

My complicated relationship with mutual aid

By: Ashley Harris-Hoduek

Mutual aid has existed since the birth of humanity. It makes sense to be generous in the hope that if we are ever in a desperate situation, someone will come to our aid. 

If you’re reading this, you are closer to experiencing homelessness at some point in your life than to being a billionaire. 

This also applies to millionaires. 

The concept is difficult to grasp, even for very low-income individuals.

I grew up with a single mom in a low-income neighborhood tucked away in the suburbs of St. Cloud. My school district's average household income is $55,000—my mom makes half of that. She has a college degree but struggled to network and was also a low-income student dealing with mental health problems. Growing up, I realized the importance of networking or fitting myself into the narrative of “middle class”—everyone, whether poor or rich, displayed themselves as such. I fit into the cliche of the nerd, then the stoner, associating myself with a wide variety of people throughout high school.

My mom was very smart with her money—she wrote down every payment in her checkbook and was careful about what she bought.

Eventually, she got a boyfriend. They had my sister when I was 15. We moved in together shortly after, and he ended up being abusive towards all of us, except for my baby sister. He was controlling and cut off our water supply. 

Eventually, my other sister’s guidance counselor said that she would have to report this to child protective services. The very next day, my mom snuck my sisters, aged 2 and 15, and me, aged 16, out of the house and plopped us into Anna Marie's homeless shelter for domestic abuse. 

There are no words to describe the shock of homelessness. I went to work, whipping up a GoFundMe. I gave up trying to present myself in a socially acceptable way and exposed myself on social media, sharing my story unfiltered—I was grateful that this paid off. This spread to my entire grade, and I raised over $1,000 for my family. My connections paid off. 

High schoolers homed me.

I am grateful to each and every one, but this should not be the reality. Mutual aid, like what I received, puts a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. It is an individual approach with individual solutions, but many of the people who I shared the shelter with are still there. So many children. 

Most of these families are Black and brown, despite the fact that 77% of St. Cloud’s population is white. While I had access to a community with some intergenerational wealth, this is not true for most poor individuals. If I hadn’t attended a suburban school, if I weren’t able to network there, or if I had faced more debilitating mental health problems, I probably would still be floating from shelter to shelter.

With no bottom-of-the-line infrastructure and no safety net for most Americans, victims of medical debt, intergenerational poverty, and tragedy fall through the cracks. Mutual aid pulls a few out from hell, but most fall and aren’t helped back out. Social safety nets were temporarily created during the pandemic but are quickly expiring. If something is not done, more and more children will continue to fall into hell.

Mutual aid proves that the world can be human and that most people do care. It's also important for grassroots organizations that speak out against capital. However, these organizations are not directly able to put the welfare state we need into law.

This sounds utopic, but is the reality in countries like Sweden, which is a partial welfare state and has more billionaires per million people than the US. It is possible to live in a wealthy country and not be at risk of starving or freezing to death. We simply have to dream “big” while realizing and shaping this dream into something simple and economically friendly that Americans can support. 

Fewer poor people en masse will lead to a more educated America, a more innovative America, a richer America. We need our politicians to value us as much as Americans value each other. Mutual aid is the realization of a problem but is not the solution for an equitable America.