Creating Ecosystems of Care Through Mutual Aid

As COVID-19 (Coronavirus Disease) spread in the United States in Spring 2020, conventional safety nets were overwhelmed and unable to meet widespread and growing needs. Mutual aid practices proliferated as an essential form of resource provision and community care, including exchanges of food, financial assistance, and social connection. Our qualitative study interviewed 25 individuals engaged in mutual aid in Colorado, USA to investigate the perceived benefits of providing and receiving care through mutual aid in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that nonhierarchical care offered entry points to equitable ways of supporting communities through and beyond crisis. The non-hierarchical approach to care described in our study illustrated redistributed power and agency to meet community needs, and decentering institutional decision making. The experiences of mutual aid participants propose a significant ideological shift regarding our sense of care and community when conventional systems are insufficient to meet collective and individual needs, and suggest a need for future expansions of and changes to social work practice to embrace non-hierarchical care.