More than a decade ago, Erin Barnes came across some data that drove home the importance of grassroots, volunteer-led groups.
The U.S. Forest Service was trying to take inventory of all the groups that maintain green space in New York City, of which there were nearly 3,000 in 2007. About three-quarters were led by volunteers, roughly half were unincorporated, and more than a third had annual budgets of less than $1,000.
“They were literally stewarding all the open green space of New York City,” Barnes says. “It’s a huge asset that was being cared for by this distributed model of people with different types of values about community investment.”
This kind of organizing is a key element of civic participation and how social change happens, Barnes says. “There’s so much about this hyperlocalism and caring for community that’s so critical to a healthy society.”
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Barnes went on to co-found Ioby, a nonprofit that serves very small grassroots groups. Ioby — the name stands for “in our backyards” — offers a crowdfunding platform and fundraising coaching, as well as other assistance. The group doesn’t push the idea that these organizations are supposed to “grow up” to become 501(c)(3) charities, Barnes says.
As the pandemic upended lives and livelihoods, people around the country came together to help ensure their communities had access to food, money for rent, childcare assistance, and other basic needs. Many of these groups organized under the banner of mutual aid, a practice with deep historical roots that continues to exist in many forms.
Mutual Aid Hub, which was started by the nonprofit Town Hall Project to track such organizations, counted more than 1,000 groups as of August. Many of them came together in response to Covid-19.
Mutual-aid groups emphasize an egalitarian way of meeting needs and providing help with no strings attached. Community-based nonprofits may participate in and collaborate with mutual-aid networks, but the groups themselves are typically volunteer led and unincorporated — often because they prefer it that way.
Some mutual-aid organizers and participants oppose the bureaucracy and hierarchies of nonprofits and the donor-recipient power dynamic that dominates many charities.
“There aren’t donors versus constituents versus volunteers, but rather we have this huge overlap of all three,” says Frank Fredericks, a former nonprofit leader who is involved with Astoria Mutual Aid Network in Queens. It’s the idea that everyone has needs and everyone has something to give back. “There’s this breakdown of these categories, and that’s part of the beauty of mutual aid.”
Ioby, which had learned a thing or two about the challenges grassroots groups face, launched a pilot program to support 10 mutual-aid groups in the New York area. Ioby’s assistance includes fiscal sponsorship, which allows the groups to accept charitable donations even though they don’t have tax-exempt status themselves.
As local needs have ebbed and flowed since the start of the pandemic, the organizations have continued to evolve. Some are now seeking nonprofit status as a way to attract more funding from foundations and businesses so they can continue offering assistance as smaller contributions have waned. Others are working to distribute the money they raised and are considering disbanding.
The groups’ divergent paths show both the promise and the precariousness of mutual aid as a way for communities to meet their own needs at a time when other systems fail to deliver.
You don’t do better work because you have certain indicators of incorporation. You do better work by doing better work.
Get-It-Done Attitude
Up until July, Fredericks was executive director of World Faith, an international nonprofit that brings together young people from different faiths to lead development projects where they live. He identifies with the effective altruism movement’s idea that people should use their resources to do the most good they can.
“It’s quite a strong motivator to do international work because oftentimes you get a dollar to go a lot further doing that work,” he says. Before the onset of the pandemic, he hadn’t been involved much locally in Astoria, Queens, where he’s lived since 2009.
That changed when he found himself stuck at home. He connected with the organizers of the Astoria Mutual Aid Network and began volunteering. The network became a place where many direct services in Astoria were coalescing — shopping and delivering food and hygiene products for neighbors, checking in on the elderly, helping people navigate health care or insurance information, for example. Fredericks helped create a fundraising team, applied for grants, and worked to develop the group’s accounting practices.
He saw Astoria Mutual Aid Network as an opportunity to quickly tap into the people and resources needed to address urgent concerns.
“If that means we’re working with an old-school nonprofit, fine.” he says. “If it means we’re helping start a new nonprofit, fine. If it means we’re getting a government grant, fine. But how do we get it done so that our community is taken care of?”
That just-get-it-done attitude resonates with Barnes. The structure an organization takes should fit the work, not donors’ expectations, she says. “You don’t do better work because you have certain indicators of incorporation. You do better work by doing better work.”
It’s not an accident that many grassroots efforts to meet basic needs exist outside of the nonprofit ecosystem, says Tyrone McKinley Freeman, associate professor of philanthropic studies at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. Mutual-aid groups are intentionally developed outside of the state and existing social-welfare systems, which often exclude them or aren’t responsive to community needs, Freeman says.
“These groups maintain a versatility to be what they need to be for the people that are in them and what they’re dealing with,” he says.
Flexibility and Hurdles
For some groups, not having tax-exempt status was — and continues to be — a logistical barrier.
Hadass Wade was working in restaurants before the pandemic forced their closure. She poured herself into creating the fundraising infrastructure for Bed-Stuy Strong, a mutual-aid network in Brooklyn. She stitched together a series of payment apps — Venmo, PayPal, Zelle, and Cash App — to filter into a “community fund” in a personal bank account that the group used to purchase groceries and other items that neighborhood residents needed.
“Having the flexibility of movement through those different platforms really helped us move a lot of money and provide a lot of groceries and supplies over the course of the month,” she says. But many platforms had limits on how much money individuals could move each day or week, while groups with tax-exempt status or a corporate bank account had more flexibility.
Fiscal sponsorship through Ioby removed some of the risks for individual organizers, who no longer had to use their personal bank accounts. It also allowed groups to attract charitable gifts without incorporating as nonprofits themselves.
Bed-Stuy Strong has raised nearly $1.4 million, and organizers have committed to spend down financial reserves. The group has maintained public spreadsheets to show how much money is coming in and going out.
Organizers are working to figure out how to distribute cash grants to neighbors in need. Beyond that, they’re discussing how the group may adapt or change. “We’re also examining the possibility that there might not be a reason for Bed-Stuy Strong to exist anymore,” Wade says.
That impermanence is something that appeals to some of these groups’ organizers, who believe that many nonprofits are more interested in managing a problem as opposed to eradicating it.
‘A Sense of Urgency’
Other mutual-aid groups are looking for ways to make their organizing more sustainable.
At the peak of demand, East Brooklyn Mutual Aid provided groceries for 200 families a week in the borough’s Ocean Hill-Brownsville community. But as many people have returned to work, there has been a steady decline in the number of people giving and volunteering, says Kelvin Taitt, one of the group’s co-founders.
“Our fundraising has diminished to where we’ve had to make some very difficult choices in reducing our capacity to deliver groceries to our most vulnerable populations,” he says.
East Brooklyn Mutual Aid, which also has fiscal sponsorship through Ioby, raised a significant amount of money using Ioby’s crowdfunding platform. But peer-to-peer donations aren’t enough for the group to continue meeting its mission.
“We have realized that it’s not sustainable, the model that we have now,” Taitt says. “We need to make the shift to reaching out to donors who can supply larger resources to build capacity for systems that are fair and equitable in our communities.”
This summer, the board of East Brooklyn Mutual Aid voted to create a food cooperative, which will run alongside a nonprofit arm to raise funds.
The group believes the cooperative structure allows for more democratic decision making; community members will have a say in decisions that directly affect their households. The nonprofit’s Board of Directors will be made up of the same group of people who have been leading the mutual-aid group.
“There’s a sense of urgency that us folks on the ground have in the communities,” Taitt says. “So many folks don’t see that from a lot of nonprofits.”
Legacy to Build On
Wherever mutual-aid groups land in terms of structure or continuity, one of the most powerful benefits of hyperlocal organizing is the ways in which it builds what Barnes calls “civic muscle.”
Under the stress of a pandemic and other crises, people had the experience of building decision-making structures with neighbors they’d never met before. “These mutual-aid groups basically are leading experts in how to get something done effectively amidst a network of broken systems,” she says. “They’re like the people who can duct tape and get some chewing gum and tie some string together and figure out how to make sure that communities are safe.”
Those lessons don’t go away, even if the ways that volunteers stay involved in their communities change.
“No matter what, if all of these groups dissolve and people move on and do other things, they never are going to lose that experience and that practice,” says Barnes.
For Fredericks, participating in mutual aid was a wake-up call for how a diverse group of people could come together for good. He’s recently volunteered and donated to local political campaigns and joined a neighborhood committee focused on expanding economic opportunity.
“I wouldn’t have joined a community board committee had it not been for getting involved in this work,” he says. “Aligning yourself with people who want to accomplish what you do to improve your community is important. We’re literally cultivating our capacity to be prepared for the next disaster.”
