167: Healing and Helping with Mutual Aid with Dean Spade

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Thanks. I'm so glad to be here.

Diving into this, I guess it's kind of a mark of my privilege, I think as a White middle-class person somewhere north of the age of 40, and I'm just now discovering what mutual aid is for the first time. And so for those who are listening, watching this, who are in a similar boat to me, can you please help us by understanding what is Mutual Aid? Firstly, and then how is it different from volunteering and charity?

And the history that you're telling me the history of enclosures is my history, right? I'm English originally. So yeah, this is the history of where I come from and I actually didn't know about the mutual aid response to that. I only heard the traditional stories of the enclosures and of course, the workhouses that came after that as well. And so okay, so you said a lot right there, and I think one thing that really stuck out to me was this idea that we have the idea where our culture kind of tells us, if you're not functioning well in our society right now, that is because there is some kind of problem that you are having, and most people who are listening to this podcast are parents, you know, we may be struggling, we may be struggling with our child's behavior, we may be struggling with feelings of overwhelm, and so we're told, “Well, clearly, there's something wrong with you,” because everybody else is doing okay. And so if you could just kind of shift the way that you're showing up in this, then things will be better for you, right? you'll be able to function normally in our society. And I think you're absolutely right, that what that does is completely ignores and basically says this whole structural thing that is the real reason why you're struggling is irrelevant and is therefore not something that we should focus on changing, and yeah, I think that leads directly to what you said about where we just kind of wait for the next election and wring our hands, because what else can we do? And that I see is the power of mutual aid. It's the thing to do, instead of waiting for the election. Is that how you see it all fit together?

Yes, I think that it is one of the things we played offers us a chance to change the material conditions right now, as opposed to symbolic action. We're mostly encouraged take symbolic action, post something on social media, read certain books, or like certain things, buy a t shirt, have a bumper sticker, like whatever it is, which I think is primarily symbolic action because we're like, are you going to vote for this wealthy candidate who represents wealthy interest? or this wealthy candidate who represents health interests? this person who's going to promote war? or this person is going to promote? this person is going to deport everybody? or this person is going to put everything? that those have been our only choices while I've been alive for 45 years, those kinds of things feel I think, reasonably very dead end for a lot of us. I mean, like, what can I do about the Supreme Court? I can't do much about it, literally, I can't do anything about it. And so the question is like, how could I feel like I could actually do something that makes any difference in like the suffering that is, you know, ubiquitous, and that mutual aid is about that. It's like, Oh, I could like create a new way of life with other people on my block right now and so that the old people on my block were isolated and suffering in various ways that are common in a society that abandons old people, you know, I think what you're saying, too, I just wanted where I see, I'm not a parent, you know, very close to all people who are, I see, so many parents, I know, have so much guilt, I can't possibly do this, right. And they feel guilt over things that are systemic, and structural, you can't provide your kids that because you live in a society that you know, where you have to work to make somebody else rich and so you're working really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really hard, you can't possibly have these things, or you have to send your kid to a school that we're like, it's really not working out for the kid or any other option. That's not you, that's like a collective problem. Your health needs aren't being met by brutal healthcare system for profit, and you feel that you don't have the energy or capacity to do some of the things you wish you could do with, you know, like, just like, or you don't have childcare so your kids spending more time alone in front of a screen than you wish they weren't, like these kinds of things that people I know, feel guilty about that are just, you know, very individualized, it's necessary. It's very blamey towards friends, like extreme everyone judges parents and obviously, that is not done evenly. You know, there's so much evidence that you know, Black parents and indigenous parents, and poor parents, and friends with disabilities are much more likely like Catholic kids, stay away from them in the system, not everybody's parenting is under the same microscopes as everybody else, but I think that internalized feeling about being an inadequate parent seems nearly universal among people I know, all except for really entitled sexist men who don't feel like any obligation to parents but amongst people I know who are all, you know, struggling hard to try to provide their kids with, like a beautiful, caring, held, loving experience inside utterly brutal society, the answer cannot be individual striving, it has to be collective action, empathy, compassion, and I think one of the things that a lot of people in our movements talk about, I spent my life in, you know, radical social movements is how people will sometimes drop out of the movement when they become a parent, that is so messed up and that's because we haven't figured out how to collectivize childcare and collectivized food, and collect like, it's like if everyone's living in their own little house, or their own little apartment and we often do three meals a day for these kids with all the snacks and we all have to do, it's like, historically, people lived in larger groups, and collectivize, a lot of that labor and it's really, really hard. And the reason we have to live in these tiny units is because a certain kind of industrialization made us have a certain set of wage jobs that where you had to be highly mobile and it's also like a better consumer package, so they can sell us more stuff if we all have to have like a microwave, and we all have to have a set of dishes, and we all have to have a refrigerator, etc. It's really great for making us all have to work a ton and spend the time. I think it's a really interesting question not only that we need to fight for childcare and health care and these kinds of things more broadly in our society, but also that can we produce collective experiments? And can we get involved with the ones that already exist in places like where you live in the Bay Area? There's plenty of examples of long-term people living collectively in collective houses, people doing collective childcare experiments, collective summer camps and other kinds of schools, and you know, just like, what are the options?

So how do we get that kind of thing started? And I think that you have pointed out that people often come to the idea of mutual aid, they're introduced to it after some kind of crisis. Why is that?

Okay, I guess, so many different threads we could follow there. Coming back to what you said at the beginning, it seems to me, it's almost like the disaster gives us permission to step outside of these tightly constrained boxes that we found ourselves in up to this point, and to see “Oh, there's another way of doing this, clearly, the government all of its emergency planning is not going to come and save me right now and so I'd better help myself, and help other people too.” And then I kind of linking from that I was just thinking about New York Times article from a couple of months ago, maybe a little longer ago, you were mentioning about kind of fleeing war and that, you know, folks from Ukraine are coming into Eastern Europe and being welcomed with open arms and sort of, you know, people coming from further away more who have darker skin, they're coming from Central Africa, who are kind of looking at like, wait, what the Ukrainians are being welcomed in with open arms, and we've been standing here for a year or more now, and you're doing everything you can to keep us out. And that just sparks a question in my mind, is there a danger that mutual aid makes us rally around people who look like us, you act like us, who eat the same food as us, and creates another kind of othering? What do you think about that?

Yeah. And in a way it's not surprising, right? Since it's the way we grew up with, it's the model we've had. It's not surprising that until we unlearn that we would go ahead and replicate that in the kinds of new systems that we're setting up, and I think so many of the examples that you're giving are related to capitalism, right? It's disasters to some extent because we kind of see things, as these things as natural disasters and we ignore that there are economic and social factors that underpin who is affected by disasters, but even the disasters aside, there's sort of this ordinary disaster of capitalism, and I ran a survey in my community recently to figure out what people knew about patriarchy, White supremacy, and capitalism, and most folks knew what patriarchy White supremacy were and had some sense of how they show up in their families, most people didn't really know so much about what capitalism was, and kind of saw it as a either a neutral to slightly beneficial system, I think you probably see it a bit differently than that. Can you help us see how is capitalism creating these conditions, that means mutual aid is the response that we need to have to be able to survive.

Yeah, this is such a giant question. I hope what I'm going to say is useful. No, I love this question is so important. Basically, what I would say if someone is like, ask me in an elevator, what is capitalism, I would say, throughout most of human history, people survived by sharing and collaborating and there was very little hierarchal difference inside people's human groups, it wouldn't make sense in terms of the group survival to have anyone put in a cage their life during their life, it wouldn't make sense to have anyone have a giant pile of goods or belongings while other people starve, It was just like, let's all collaborate to get by, and sometimes there were like, ceremonial roles or whatever, but we tend to look back and look at people's, look at any of those markers and think it meant the same thing it means now and it did. So for the most of human history people live with like, much, much, much greater, like, basic equality of the basics of having what you need and the goal of the group was to make sure everybody survived and have what they needed. And that was, and only very recently in human history, have, we had systems that were very small numbers of people whom we might call elites, control the conditions of life of very large numbers of people, you know, we're a smaller people, we're gonna make everyone go to war, work under conditions that break their bodies, a few people are getting really wealthy from that, and the people who are doing the work are gonna barely be able to survive, and it's gonna shorten their lives. How do you organize everyone to agree to that, and that's what we live under. We live under a thing we're like, a very smaller people have almost everything and globally, and that's gotten like, way worse during my lifetime, way worse, like, it's really bad, globally, right, really bad domestically, also, and that's, you know, racialized and gender and all those things and colonialism really made that happen, and slavery, and anything's make that happen, the things that I think your listeners know about. And that system puts us in a position where it's like, if I don't go to work, I could like have nowhere to live, I could starve, right? And so that is really intense, It controls our day-to-day so thoroughly, I don't have a say in where my energy comes from, and where my clothes come from, I have to participate in all these really horrible systems while my clothes are made in sweatshops, Oh, my food came through a fossil fuel dependence system, ah, the energy, I'm using what's from coal, and I have like no choices, and I don't even know who makes those choices, like all the choices that in our life are made by people I've never met, we're really far away and I've never heard of. And then there's like, kind of the government as a foe thing, It was like pretending or I suppose we have a state, let's say, for two wealthy candidates who represent the interests of those people I've never heard of who actually control my energy, my food, and my water, my transportation. Capitalism is the name for like an economic system, most of us have to sell our time and labor to loyal for somebody else making all the money. The way that I talk to my students about this is that imagine you're like in the factory to make shoes, you've never met your boss or whatever, or like, whoever owns this is like, a million, million miles away from you on all levels, and you all have gratitude to them, like, oh, wow, we make the shoes. We make the shoes, they're paying us as little as possible per hour and skimming as much as possible, like, what if we kept the wealth in the hands of people who make the shoes and you make the leather, it's useful to look at people who've taken back their factories like all of the real beginning, when people do factory takeover and workers takeover factories feeling that we don't have enough it's not true, like the poverty or like gap, or scarcity we all live in is artificially produced by a system of domination, very centrally creates a system of private property that says like, this factory isn't ours, the house where I live isn't mine like it belongs to somebody else or to accompany, it's just a set of fictions where private property is just like a set of fictions that are enforced by police and militaries that set of fictions with a really heavy gun behind it, and we all live under it. And then we live in this realm where we're like part of us, and I think, people think it's good as all these mythologies that people are naturally greedy and so we need the system to protect us we need all the that what these guns are doing protecting us from each other, when actually they're protecting like the leads from us being like, “Hey, wait, why do you have everything and I don't have anything, and I have to do this work?” Right? Are we also live under a mythology that property is natural which there's no evidence of that, historically, that's not. It's actually like a very new small idea that people had to be like forced into, there's lots of great things to read about that, part of what that feels like on a day to day is like being told what to desire, we have all these consumer desires where like, maybe that will make me happy, maybe if my family had that house, maybe if I had those clothes, maybe if I looked that way, if I had that body, that's like the currency that like keeps us in our places, and keeps us striving inside like these really crappy systems, like maybe I'll be the one who claims a little higher in that system and maybe those things will make us happy even though of course, we know they don't make us happy at all. I think parents are pretty good at telling children like that video game won't make you happy, that candy won't make you happy, but we're not very good at telling ourselves climbing this will not ever make me happy. I'm deeply alienated and sad and isolated by this. And so part of the reason that like mutual aid is really significant is because it reminds us I think of who we really are like, it reminds us we naturally share, we're naturally connected, we desire belonging, and safety, and creativity, and like the dignity of standing up for ourselves more than we desire like that shiny bubble. And so Mutual Aid is a chance to practice like I'm with other people in my community we're doing something we believe in, this is a kind of satisfaction that we'll never get from consumer desire and it's like hard, but also people really have my back like now in front of all people who are different from me, these people who would like visit me if I was sick. You know, there's like a level of isolation, our society that is at its peak right now, like more people live alone than have ever lived alone in human history, more people report that they don't have a single person to confide good or bad news in or a lot of people are isolated, the only the person they're really exposed to is just their romantic or sexual or co-parenting partner and that's very unhealthy for those relationships to just be stuck in them in isolation, capitalism produces all of that. And we're also told that capitalism is what creates innovation and there wouldn't be new cool science and stuff without capitalism, it's just not true. It's like it actually prevents innovation because things can only be developed for like military or profit purposes. We could have a million amazing, interesting thoughtful ways of developing playgrounds or child care or health care, anybody could have done a better job than capitalists making sure that COVID was treated, that the vaccines came out and they were distributed all over the world, instead, few people got extremely rich from the way COVID was handled, and COVID was not handled, right, like so, you know, the deaths continue. And so the way I guess I would think about capitalism or encouraged within capitalism is just like, it's a complex system of domination, that kind of sets us against our own interests, makes us think there's no alternative, like one of its big messages is that this is the only way it can be, which is just not true because it's been a million other ways forever, everywhere, and tells us not to trust ourselves or each other and so that we can basically be controlled by a system that ultimately benefits a very tiny set of elites. The opposite thing that I want is, I want to live in a world in which we collective self-determination is how we run things, like if people in our sector of the city want our energy not to come from fracking or coal that we can like work together to sort that out, figure out what a mini-grid would be in a giant energy company, determining this forest that starts fires because it doesn't maintain its infrastructure, right, or that we could be working together on food systems that are far more local and not fossil fuel dependent, all of that is prevented by ways that capitalism controls every resource and people. Also, I just want to say, most of us haven't gotten to see the resistance to capitalism that is existed the entire time that anyone's been trying to make capitalism and that is beautiful, and that is happening all the time, everywhere, and for me, studying resistance movements, contemporary and historical, is really, really, really helpful and relieving to my nervous system, and to my fears about like, oh my god, it's so bad how we ever get out of it, I think a lot of people on Earth throw up their hands and like it's hopeless will never happen, but it's like, everyone who's ever lived in any system felt that was the only system, they come and go because people practice otherwise and then also like, we can practice otherwise together during it and create pockets of other outcomes like we can actually help people on our committees have things they need that they can't get under this system, and we can do that, like right now, we don't have to wait, doesn't have to be all or nothing. Is capitalism gonna entirely end in my life? I have no way of knowing that it doesn't really matter. It's like what's happening right now in my city, to young people who don't have housing? What's happening right now? Where do I want to plug in? Anywhere, it's the right place to start.

Okay, as we sort of head towards a conclusion, I had queued up a couple of questions and now I think I'm seeing that they're even more related, so I wanted to know what does mutual aid look like? I'm actually realizing that we call it not school, my child's not in school, we're homeschooling and she's part of a sort of a care collaborative, and realizing that their model is shifting, and it's increasingly becoming what essentially seems to be mutual aid, and that, you know, how decisions are made and what it looks like, how those decisions being made is very, very different from what it would be if we were in school where you're told what school is going to look like, and when you're going to show up, and there's no alternative to that system once you've decided to be in it. So I want to get a sense for sort of what mutual aid looks like, I'm curious about kind of healing, what mutual aid is like, and healing what I'm seeing and what you're saying is that through being in mutual aid systems I can work to heal myself like being involved in this is healing to me, and I guess if I can piggyback one more thing on that, I'm wondering how you avoid burnout when there are so many things you've brought, I've seen the list of things that you're involved in on your website. So I wonder, can you tackle that broad package of questions?

Totally. Yeah, the term mutual aid of people surviving through sharing that aspect of mutual aid but in terms of mutual aid, like what we mean today, by like, when people are in groups that are, we're going to provide each other's basic survival needs, with a shared understanding of the system creates these needs, and with an invitation to collective action. What I mean by that is usually people in groups that can be, you know, as small as three people, and as big as you know, hundreds and hundreds of people or more coordinating, to meet a need, we're going to give or unless people are living, or we're going to hang out outside the jail and support people who are being released to make sure they have a ride, don't get arrested again, and have some food and you know, can make calls or you know, whatever it is, we're going to do prison pe npal letters, whatever. What that looks like, is those people who are in that group, were in that mutual aid group, they are coordinating together, we're working together to identify like, what do we agree about, like a shared problem that we feel urgency around? How do we want to do what are we gonna do Mondays are gonna do on Tuesdays? Are we going to do you know, there's gonna be weeklies every month, are we gonna meet on Zoom, or we're gonna meet in person, like these kinds of things like they have make a structure together and I think the key thing that you're saying is, mutual aid is best done not hierarchical and it's really hard because almost all of us have only been in hierarchical groups and decision making spaces, families, where parents or dads or whatever, in charge schools, where it's principals or superintendents, you know, bosses at jobs, landlords, everywhere you go, you're just either in the role of dominating others, or you're like, keep your head down and obey, and those are kind of the two things we're conditioned to, so that's part of we have to heal from is that those are the only ways we know how to be it's either like my way or the I'm gonna get to the top of this thing, I'm gonna make other people do my way, or I'm going to be quiet, keep my head down and what we want in mutual aid groups is to have everyone's wisdom, we want everyone to pay if you know that Tuesdays is a bad day because that's the day the other group meets tell us, you know, or if you know that doing it this way will actually exclude people with disabilities participating, tell us, you know, and so we want to create group spaces which there's not a hierarchy, which we're in also because hierarchies tend to replicate societal ones so if we have a president and a committee chair, and whatever, we're likely to just see Whiteness, and maleness and higher ed, and whatever, you know, race to the top, right? and so we really want to create a space in which, especially if we want to make sure that our group includes people who are experiencing different levels of stigma and vulnerability, and serves people who are experiencing those levels, we want to make sure that the wisdom of people experience as many of those things as possible is front and center, because those people are going to know about how that system is landing on them, what would make this work for them, or not work for them, etc. So we want to create a way of making decisions together and communicating that isn't hierarchical and so people often structure that it's a collective they use consensus decision making, I think consensus decision making, really, that idea intimidates a lot of people, they're like, “Oh, my God, it would be so hard for us all to decide things together.” All that means is that like, someone brings a proposal, and you talk about it until you can make it something everyone can live with. That's all that means. People do in their friendships all the time. I'm like, “Yeah, you know, let's meet for dinner” and you're like, “Oh, cool. How about Tuesday?” “I'd like to do Wednesday or Thursday?” “Okay, how about Wednesday,” and then “Do you want to go to a place on the corner?” “Oh, no, I'm not eating that right now. How about if we go to another place? Okay.” That consensus decision-making, proposal iron it out, so you just do that in groups which requires you to gain some skills, It doesn't have to be exactly the way I imagined it. I don't have to get my, if I brought the proposal, I don't have to be wedded to it. I don't have to be like, this is Dean’s answer. I was like, oh, yeah, I brought this proposal and the group talked about it a bit, we realized that some research questions and then like, oh, Jen is going to take and go, like, figure out what the real deal is with renting those kinds of cars, or whatever.” Like, it's, I'm not, I have to get Dean’s rolls through, I'm gonna browbeat everyone in this victory and if you disagree with me, or bring up any questions, then I'm insecure, and we have to learn this other thing which I call desiring others participation. What would it be like if in groups, I was actually want to hear people disagree with me and bring other perspectives because that'll make the things smarter, like that will make us wiser. That's a skill and I think that's a form of healing. It's healing, a kind of insecurity that we've been given by society where everyone's climbing or falling on these like steep, steep, you know, brutal ladders, where at the bottom, there's a fear of death. So that's a big part of is that non hierarchical structure, clarity, and transparency, most of us have worked only in systems where there's no transparency, you don't know where the money comes from, you don't know how the decisions are made at your job, most nonprofits are like that too, and so instead, this is oh, yeah, we're gonna all be super, super clear. Yeah, somebody donated 50 bucks, we spent it on these water bottles and tents, you know, or whatever. The other thing is, like mutual aid groups really, really need to be open to new members, If it's just a few of us, we will get burnt out or like, oh, I had a baby and then Oh, you got sick and so now there's like two people trying to make food for 50 people want to eat you know, it's not gonna work. So how to make a group where new people could enter really know what's going on, we understand how we make decisions together and there's a lot of like guidance in my book about how to do this stuff If people are like kind of looking for the short and sweet and on my website, there's a bunch of videos about ironing out some of the things people tend to run into. The healing pieces, really, you know, so glad you asked that, I firmly believe that we experience our wounding in groups mostly in our family group and also in schools, and jobs, like, that's where our wounding happens, and it's wounding where we feel not belonging, where we feel not safe, where we feel that we don't have our autonomy, or we don't have enough accompaniment, where we feel our humanity is questioned, or we don't have dignity. So healing to be in groups where we feel something else. “Oh, I was listened to.” “Oh, people really saw me.” “Oh, people included me.” We were partly cared about together and I was like, proud to be part of this group and they were proud to have all of those things can be, you know, such a relief, not to mention deeper stuff. I don't think most of us have had experiences of being hurt, having someone give a sincere apology, and then give us sincere forgiveness and let it go like that is a beautiful arc that I feel very lucky to have experienced in my life. Most of us, like conflict, is terrifying. We never bring it up. We hold secret resentments, it’s because we live in a prison-based society that's like super afraid to let people mistakes and feels like everything's super high stakes, and so it's amazing to be in groups where you can be like, “Oh, hey, like, the way you keep saying that it's rough on me. It's like, not the language my community uses,” or “When you don't show up to the meetings on time, I feel like you don't value my time,” and then someone can be like, “Oh, wow, I did not know it's having an impact. I am so sorry. I'm going to think about how you can do that differently” and “Cool, I feel hurt.” Having those experiences changes your emotional capacity to think and a lot of the mutual aid groups that I you know, I've had been part of and I work with a lot of group that are trying to sort out struggle with learning how to give and receive direct feedback, learning how not to gossip, learning how to forgive, learning how to be humble, and listen to people, learning how to listen somebody, even if they don't deliver it your favorite way, you know, like all of that stuff, these are skills we just don't have living in a society that's about being dominated in most of our relationships or trying to dominate. And the question of burnout a lot of people feel burnt out in general by a society in which rents are higher than they've ever people work credibly long hours, credibly long, much longer than have people have worked in the past, there's no support for childcare, you know, people are living with unaddressed health needs because the healthcare system is so terrible, etc. The stress of living with the constant, imminent emergencies and crises and seeing the suffering of others and all of it, I think that sometimes the response is this thing that's capitalism's message, which is you need to rest, go watch TV, go take substances, go on a tropical vacation. I don't think those things are actually restorative for people, I really don’t. What I see for myself and others I think that we have no idea what we find restorative, we most of us are completely unable to find solitude, silence, connection to nature, and how to settle our nervous systems, instead of I’m watching terrifying movie to relax, like, what? What I noticed is that community work I'm involved, it's hard, It can include conflict, it includes being close to different kinds of suffering, sometimes there's been a lot of death and a lot of the groups that I'm in because people are very vulnerable, and I still feel it's restorative to me. I asked myself, when does it feel exhausting? Like, “Oh, I'm tired, and I need to rest and when does it feel like it's draining or toxic?” You know, because workplaces are often draining and toxic, and dating and love relationships are frequently dread dating and tough. But I think the question is, can I be involved in work in my community, especially unpaid work, because of course, you know, the bulk of the work we need to do to create a new society is going to be unpaid because why would our opponents were people all the money pay us to do this? How can unpaid work, the feeling I can have is like, I'm really choosing to be here? Sweet. I'm on purpose, right now I'm feeling my shared purpose with others in this room that we don't want anyone to be evicted, or that we want everyone to have loving parenting, or that we want everyone to have whatever it is we're working on, right? How we want everyone to eat some delicious food on Sunday, whatever it is, like how can I feel my purpose, and then I noticed that I have an ingrained habit from living in capitalism, avoidance, I probably started when I was I was going to school as a kid, like, I don't want to go to school, I don't do this homework, you know, and then I'm at work, I'm like, I don't want to do a spreadsheet, or because you're being forced to do a bunch of stuff, so you get to super deep embodied habit of avoidance. And so one of the things I tried to do is, what are the avoidance feel like, you know, like, for me, it's just like collapse and the body slump, you know, like, tired, my head to the side, everyone's gonna feel that differently in their body, it could be like a feeling of backing up, whatever it is, and then I'm like, what is being on purpose feel like in my body, like, for me being on purposes, I feel something kind of upright, and I feel kind of upward motion, and I want to go forward with others and what do I have to do before I do any task, or before I go to this meeting, and before I sit down and fill out the spreadsheet I'm working on forming mutual aid projects about you know, who's going to call who, when, or who's gonna stay at work, whose house? How do I feel purpose when I do the ordinary Monday work of mutual aid, changing a diaper or chopping an onion, whatever, like, how do I do that? And so for me, that's like an active process which I've worked on over the years to try to recover from burnout/avoidance vibes that I actually am bringing, for good reason, no blame or judgment, but that I'm often bringing so because going to work at my job or someone makes money off me shouldn't feel the same as going to my mutual aid project, but it might and that's not my fault and my job is just to be conscious of that. Actually, doing social movement work in my community does not increase my burnout If I can orient to. Am I part of creating non-toxic vibes here? Am I part of remembering why I'm here and feeling connected to others? Can I walk into this meeting and look around and actively try to feel my belonging, instead of just hoping someone will deliver my belonging to me, you know, like can actively feel my connection to others? What do I need to do? Do I want to call folks more? Do I want to text folks? What do I want to do to make this feel like what it is, which is saving each other's lives, but it might not because we all have these habits, you know, from this other experience of society. So I think that the question of burnout when people are like, I can't do social limit work because of burnout I just want to kind of get in there a little more complexity, social movement work is healing and is essential, and also all-powerful social movements for liberation that have ever happened were done by people who were living under the worst conditions, they were tired, they were living with substandard housing, they didn't have enough food, their kids were being killed. The people who have fought the hardest for liberation and freedom like from the colonizer against war, etc., have always been those on the losing end. They've had the most skin in the game. Who am I to say, I'm too tired? With my work? Yes, like take care of ourselves, have an assessment about our well-being, yes, I feel like there's a too early stop there for a lot of people, what can I do in my life generally, to switch shift a lot of my like energy toward this from other places where I might burning myself out, with like toxic entertainment, or with really horrifyingly bad relationships, you know, endlessly, butting your head against the kind of like, is there any way that I can be crafting my life so that I have energy for the things that I think actually gonna save our lives, instead of only feeling kind of stopping the question with I'm tired from living in this brutal society, and yes, we are, of course, we are in like having compassion for that and then just continuing to be curious about what could generate in me opportunities to build beautiful enlivening connective collaboration with others for justice.

Which also brings a sense of agency, right? Like, I'm not just sitting in this system waiting to vote, waiting for somebody else to change the circumstances that are holding me down, that I can have the agency to be the architect of my life, yes, I still have to go to work and also I can be around people who care about the same things as I do, and I can make sure that they see my needs for childcare, and that we all provide food when we get together so that we don't have to cook that night and have this interaction be something that is generative to us rather than something that feels like oh, that's another thing I have to do.

Can I say one more thing about that thing, about waiting for others? I just want to say like, I think a lot of people in United States have a fantasy that the government is going to solve our problems and I just want to be real. It's absolutely not going to happen. If you have any questions the Democrats won Biden has the presidency, he is supporting more people, we are nowhere on climate where it's also getting worse. He is pro-war on every level, we're not about to have an electoral system, where we could elect anybody who's not one of those. That is what is happening that's been happening my entire life, time's up, for waiting for people to save us and I think it's very hard especially for parents, I know, to confront how dire the situation is, especially the climate situation, and that it is not going to improve in your children's lifetime, so the only question now is, how do we prepare for each coming emergency and build as much like strong bold resistance that could stop projects like pipelines and could stop wars as possible, our only job is to be involved in that, and that is uncomfortable to look, frankly, at how no one is coming to save us, and how actually everyone in charge is hastening our demise but if we do care about young people and future generations, it is essential to just take off the blinders and apply ourselves to the current immediate tasks, which are real, it's not like oh, no, what do I do? It's all over the map. Every single one of us lives in the community where we can be doing housing justice activism, where we can be doing anti-war activism, or we can be trying to defund the police are like this work, the menu is has been laid out, by many, many, many, many generations of movements by brilliant peoplen and what's missing in these movements is people power, we need 10s of millions of people to be involved if we're going to win because the opposite has all the money and all the guns. So it's like we don't need like the next brilliant nonprofit report and we don't need the next election where you do the right voting, and that is not going to cut it. That's my plea to people who are listening to your podcasts, like, let ourselves feel that urgency and then do the experiments that are needed to be involved in the media.

Yeah. And as a final nugget how would you go about finding out where a mutual aid group is in your community If you have no idea where to even start looking for this?

Yeah, one resource is MutualAidHub.org. There's so many mutual aid groups they're not all on there, but at least it's like a map and so you find where your city is on that or your town and find something nearby, and then you can just message and you might find that some of the groups have collapsed since they posted on there or that they're hard to reach or whatever it just like you know, just dig around like just I would just message those groups that are anywhere near where you live. What do you think is going on where I live, or can I get involved with what you're doing from a little bit of far, you can also always be involved in things like prison pen pal programs that you where you don't have to be in the same place as the people you're writing to. So that's one option. Also, there's a really great media outlet called It's Going Down and they have another whole set of lists of mutual aid projects and mutual aid groups and they also have a podcast with lots of detailed accounts, people doing mutual aid, which I love that because then you get like, inspired like, oh, how do they do it? What's it like? How's it working? So I think that's really useful, you know, I think if people are living in towns, like almost every town, there's like terrible sweeps of homeless encampments happening and there's people doing amazing work to support people in homeless encampments and they just need more people help pack before the cops come so people don't lose their prescription glasses when they get evicted from this park and move down to the other part of the victim from next week. There's just so much happening. But definitely, everywhere that you live, somebody's trying to defund the police, somebody's supporting unhoused people in your town, somebody is doing things about tenants who are being evicted, like those kinds of basic were common and disaster relief, I mean, the other thing is that in your own block, doing disaster preparation, you're doing that with other people in your city and especially in neighborhoods people are less likely to have the things they need, like, it's really hard to like for those of us who live in earthquake places like it's really hard to store water if you're living in really tiny apartments. So are there ways to collaborate across multiple blocks to make sure that there's enough water stored across those blocks for other people who are living, just like, do people have solar batteries, are there all people living around who have you know, or people with disabilities who have devices that they need to survive that require electricity, because the lights are definitely going out in the coming year, for short periods or for long periods. Disaster prep is something any of us can start a group to do anywhere we are, it could be at our workplace, it could be on our block, or in our you know, for living in a county, it could be doing it with neighbors across a broader region, that kind of stuff, everyone you talk to who lives somewhere where the big disaster comes, I wish I'd done that disaster prep. Let's not be those people, you know, who didn't do it.

Yeah, awesome. I'm leaving this conversation with such a sense of hope. It's really cool to see how some of the things I'm doing are already heading in this direction, and how much more there is to be involved in that doesn't have to be draining and something that I have to do, but that can be actually generative to me the way that I'm living my life. So thank you so much for writing the book and for being here with us today. I'm so grateful.

Thanks for having me.

And so, our listeners can find the references for all the papers that I read in preparation for today's conversation, as well as a link to Dean's book Mutual Aid Building Solidarity During This Crisis and the Next and I'll also track down all of the books that Dean has mentioned during our conversation today, and all of that will be available at YourParentingMojo.com/mutualaid.

Hi, this is Jenny from Los Angeles. We know that you have a lot of choices about where you get information about parenting and we're honored that you've chosen us as we move toward a world in which everyone's lives and contributions are valued. If you'd like to help keep the show ad-free, please consider making a donation on the episode page that Jen just mentioned. Thanks again for listening to this episode of The Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Don't forget to head to YourParentingMojo.com/ recordtheintro to record your own messages for the show.