What Is Mutual Aid?
Talking through radical community care
Welcome to the Lutruwita Activist and Mutual Aid Collective (L.A.M.A.).
We’re a group of labourers, campaigners, students and artists, working to create a community and a world where everyone’s basic needs are met and where people can thrive.
And we want you to join us. Whoever you are. Whatever you do. Everyone is welcome and needed.
So let us explain what we do in a little more detail.
Activists. We’re activists and not shy about it. After all an activist is just someone who sees how things can be better and works to bring that about.
Collectively we do our work in different ways. Some of us are involved in campaigning and political action, some of us provide services directly to people and communities who need them. All of us work with tiny budgets and big hearts.
Activism requires a lot of behind the scenes work and support. From painting banners, to storing equipment, to meeting to work out strategy, to gather and celebrate the work that we do.
We hope that LAMA can be a place for all groups working for a better world to base themselves.
Mutual Aid. Mutual aid is a part of not only making the world a better place, but it is about becoming better activists and building collective solidarity and capacity. As mutual aid expert Dean Spade writes:
“Mutual aid projects work to meet survival needs and build shared understanding about why people do not have what they need.”
“Mutual aid projects mobilize people, expand solidarity, and build movements. Being able to get help in a crisis is often a condition for being politically active, because it’s very difficult to organise when you are also struggling to survive. Getting support through a mutual aid project that has a political analysis of the conditions that produced your crisis also helps to break stigma, shame, and isolation.”
“Mutual aid projects are participatory, solving problems through collective action rather than waiting for saviors”
We love mutual aid because it’s a practical bridge between supporting each other in our moments of need and working together to change the conditions that create the unmet needs in the first place.
Picture this…
Jamil is resettling in Hobart from overseas. He is trying to access government services but is finding it confusing as English is his second language. He shares his frustration at his local church, and someone offers to assist with the online forms and speak to workers over the phone on behalf of him. Jamil is relieved and feels supported as a human.
Ryan is a single parent of 2, working a fulltime job. They often struggle to find the time to go grocery shopping, and with the cost-of-living crisis cannot afford healthy groceries for their family. After sharing their struggles with Sean, the neighbour, the neighbourhood has started a community garden, with locals dropping off the produce to different houses on the street. Sean also started inviting Ryans’ family over for Thursday dinners to lighten the load of cooking, cleaning and parenting. Ryan is grateful and now feels a strong sense of belonging within the neighbourhood.
Janelle has worked as a chef for multiple years but a relative acquired a disability and she has had to leave cheffing and become their fulltime carer. She loves cooking but looking after her relative means she does not have capacity for the fast-paced, long shifts that come with being a professional chef. This significant life change has made Janelle reconsider what is most important to her. She now seeks out more community connections and safety for her and her loved one. Health and wellbeing have increased importance for Janelle, which includes eating quality produce. While shopping at the Farmgate Market, she comes across Mutual Aid Community Kitchen at Mathers House and is amazed at what happens there. She learns that farmers donate their excess produce to the kitchen and volunteers cook a free lunch for the community. Understanding first-hand the need for community support and healthy food, she inquires about how to get involved.
The following Sunday, she helps to chop vegetables while her relative sits out the front sipping tea with the other volunteers. Feeling enlivened by the space and people, she offers to write up simple recipe cards and flavour combinations for people to refer to. Both her and her relative feel supported and included in a new community.
The above stories all share something unique. They are all examples of people supporting people within the community. Help is given freely and no blame is placed on anyone who needs extra support. People share the resources and skills they have, not as isolated individuals but within a supported community network. This is mutual aid.
Mutual aid is collective coordination to meet each other’s needs, usually from an awareness that the systems we have in place are not going to meet them. Those systems, in fact, have often created the crisis, or are making things worse. - Dean Spade
At its best, mutual aid creates new systems of care and generosity that address harm and foster well-being. Mutual aid can help us envision new ways of caring, collectively, while living in a world that increasingly feels isolating and individualistic.
So, we envision a world where neighbours help neighbours, where we recognise that everyone should have the opportunity to care and be cared for and where we hold governments and corporations accountable.
At L.A.M.A. we plan to do this through supporting activist groups and supporting community members to participate in the forms of collective care that feel most comfortable to you.
To do this, we need YOUR help!
We are reaching out to all people that are passionate about building a better world through community. We are inviting anyone who thinks they have the skills, knowledge, connections or funds to help get this project off the ground. We are in desperate need for money to rent a space or connections to people with a building that could facilitate our dream in setting up a mutual aid social centre.
The past few years have not been kind to grassroots and community organisations. Imminent development and financial strain have forced many of our beloved spaces to close their doors in Nipaluna/Hobart. Together, our community has remained stronger than ever as we fight for places to meet, share, organise, commiserate and care for one another with joy and resilience.
We, the Lutruwita Activist and Mutual Aid (L.A.M.A.) Collective are a group of grassroots activists committed to realising our dream of a social centre. A hybrid community activism and mutual aid hub, open to anyone who needs a space to transform our island home for the better, co-managed by the various groups and networks using it.
If this sounds like something you’re interested in, contact us at lutruwitamutualaid@gmail.com, subscribe to our Substack x, or visit our newly formed socials @lama.collective
We can’t wait to hear from you!
L.A.M.A. Collective