This article was jointly written by Elizabeth Bechard and Samantha Schmitz.
In 2024, the Union of Concerned Scientists reported that 100% of people in the U.S. faced an extreme weather alert during the year’s “Danger Season,” the stretch from May through October when North America is most likely to experience weather threats. For those of us lucky enough not to have been directly impacted by a weather disaster in recent years, it’s almost certainly a matter of when—not if—it will be our turn to live through a devastating storm, wildfire, or heat wave. And bad weather certainly isn’t the only kind of disaster we worry about: we’ve all lived through a recent global pandemic. Many of us are profoundly concerned about current political instability and a looming economic recession too.
Research suggests that strong social ties can be a protective factor when it comes to the mental health effects of disasters, from hurricanes to pandemics. When people have more social and community support after a devastating event, they may be less likely to experience lasting mental health impacts like depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. One of the best ways to strengthen social ties is to practice actively caring for our communities.
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What are mutual aid and collective care?
According to Dean Spade, a professor at the Seattle University School of Law and author of Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next), “mutual aid is the radical act of caring for each other while working to change the world.” It’s an approach grounded in “solidarity, not charity,” acknowledging that when basic human needs aren’t met, it’s because of systemic failures, rather than individual fault.
Humans have developed practices of care throughout history and across cultures, with Indigenous and non-Western cultures particularly prioritizing care and mutual well-being. Though the idea of mutual aid is far from new, mutual aid gained popularity in the U.S. during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the pandemic disrupted routine systems and caused massive job loss, groups of people came together in remarkable ways to help meet each other’s needs and build systems of care and support, especially filling in gaps that governments couldn’t or wouldn’t provide. (Remember sewing masks for health care workers in 2020, before N95s were widely available?)
These networks are a form of collective care—an ethic with deep roots in Black feminism and Indigenous wisdom that acknowledges the interdependence of our well-being, seeing wellness as a shared responsibility rather than an individual assignment. As the systems we depend on for routine parts of life are increasingly eroded and as the likelihood of disasters escalates, mutual aid networks and practices of collective care may be more essential than ever for our ability to cope with volatile times.
How can I engage in mutual aid and collective care?
You don’t have to join or start a formal mutual aid network to practice collective care—though if you’d like to, here’s a list of existing networks across the country and a primer on how to start your own. Each of us can work on orienting our lives toward an ethos of collective care in small, intentional ways. Here are a few ideas on doing just that from the Moms Clean Air Force team:
- Get to know your neighbors. Knowing people in your community—especially the people who live closest to you—can be critical in times of crisis. It’s your neighbors who’ll be there to help you when your power goes out, when there’s a boil water notice, or when you’re running out of diapers and the stores are closed during a storm. Consider hosting a block party, book club, walking group, or craft circle. Invite a neighbor over for coffee or dinner. Chat face-to-face with people as you’re getting your mail or walking your dog. Bonus reason to talk to your neighbors: making small talk is one of the key practices of fighting tyranny, according to historian Timothy Snyder.
- Feed people. Food continues to become more expensive, and people need to eat to survive. Disasters and economic instability exacerbate food insecurity too. Support hungry people in your community by giving money and nonperishable goods to local foodbanks, donating extra snacks to your child’s school, or organizing meal trains for people going through a difficult time.
- Share your skills—and learn about your community’s skills too. If you like to cook, bring a meal to a sick neighbor. If you’re handy with cars or bicycles, help your mechanically challenged friends. If you’ve got a green thumb, plant vegetables and herbs—and share them! Learn about the skills of others in your community too. It might someday be useful to know who has medical training, who can build things, who speaks more than one language, or who has the best sense of humor when you really, really need a laugh.
- Help fund mutual aid-oriented disaster relief efforts. In the wake of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, the organization Mutual Aid Disaster Relief helped channel individual monetary contributions to people needing direct support after the storms. Individual GoFundMe pages and Venmo accounts were shared across social media after the Los Angeles wildfires. If you can afford to, sending money to people directly impacted by crises can help them survive the most difficult days.
- Help provide access to information. If you don’t already have one, get a library card and use it often—public libraries provide critical access to information for communities and are currently under attack. (For public library inspiration, the Milwaukee Public Library’s Instagram feed delivers in spades, we promise.) Consider buying books about history, race, political education, and other issues that could potentially be targeted by book bans—and lend books to your friends and neighbors.
- Support public health. Public health is a group project, one we all have a responsibility to contribute to. Stay up to date with vaccines and encourage others to do the same. Consider wearing masks in public spaces, particularly if you have regular contact with anyone who is immunocompromised or otherwise in poor health, and take time to learn about why disability rights advocates consider masking to be a deeply important form of collective care. (With the alarming potential of a bird flu pandemic on the horizon, now is a good time for a refresher on public health practices that protect others.) If you can, donate blood on a regular basis—you never know when you or a family member might be the one who needs it.
- Support families with children. No one who parented small children during the COVID-19 pandemic will forget how rapidly childcare systems evaporated in the spring of 2020. Supporting families with young children by offering or exchanging childcare is collective care at its best.
Engaging in collective care is a way of practicing for the world we want while navigating the world we have—and the relationships we build while doing so are invaluable to our mental health in difficult times.
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