Mutual Aid Tempe — Core Values
1. SOLIDARITY, NOT CHARITY
Charity is hierarchical and transactional. It assumes proximity to wealth and privilege gives someone the moral authority to save others. Charity upholds a binary of deserving and undeserving, maintaining wealth inequality.
Mutual aid recognizes that the problem is the systems, not those who suffer in them. Solidarity comes from understanding capitalism exploits us all, and together we can build alternative systems of coordinated collective care. We act in solidarity when we understand our own privileges and acknowledge the differences in our experiences, while organizing to dismantle systems of oppression and redistribute resources. Writer M. Gouldhawke states, “Solidarity means struggling alongside others, not pretending to be them. Solidarity means having your own struggle and linking it to that of others, not appropriating the struggles of others.”
There is not one singular future, but we strive for a world where “vulnerability is neither eliminated nor immunized against, but is instead a radically shared condition in which people thrive, create, learn, and proliferate forms of collective being” (Dylan Rodríguez).
2. SAFETY & PRIVACY
We value safety as an extension of community care. We redefine safety in a non-violent way. We do not work with police, the state, or any institution that contributes to the harm of our communities. When we talk about safety, we are talking about privacy, confidentiality, and respecting boundaries; we do not surveil, control, or criminalize our own community. We are also talking about public health––making a commitment to use PPE and sanitation.
3. INTENTION & RESPECT
Intention means being deliberate about our actions. It means understanding our various privileges and being aware of the spaces we inhabit, while acknowledging, adapting to, and addressing diverse needs, priorities, and perspectives. We give intentional consideration and care to each other’s needs and capacities. We reject the belief that people are disposable.
Respect means respecting boundaries and privacy, honoring the autonomy of other individuals. Mutual aid is not a photo-op or a way to paternalize others. We do not speak for others or make value judgments. Each person knows what is best for themselves.
4. COMMUNICATION & ACCOUNTABILITY
As stated previously, we do not work with police. This also means we avoid policing one another. Instead, we rely on communication to set boundaries. Each person has different capacities and comfort levels; we encourage individuals to speak up about their boundaries. Mutual aid promotes a culture of consent.
Accountability involves honesty and transparency. It is not punishment. For us, accountability means listening, learning, taking responsibility, and changing harmful behavior. As abolitionist organizer K. Agbebiyi states, “we have also normalized the mistreatment of people as long as they ‘deserve’ it, without questioning what the root causes of violence are in the first place.” Instead of punishment we look to restorative and transformative models of justice and mediation. We hold ourselves accountable by continuously evaluating our political framework. This means calling in, reflecting, and educating ourselves and our comrades.
5. HORIZONTALITY & PARTICIPATION
Horizontality means decentralization and the sharing of power. This reduces power imbalances and hierarchies, encouraging everyone to participate. That said, participation in our network is voluntary and fluid. No one is locked into any position.
6. COLLECTIVE LIBERATION
“Nobody’s free until everybody’s free” - Fannie Lou Hamer
We recognize that mutual aid is not new. It is a practice that BIPOC have engaged in predating capitalism and colonialism––not only to survive, but to thrive. Collective liberation involves sharing power, knowledge, and resources across movements, while recognizing how they are interlinked. This is collaborative work centered around solidarity, but it is essential to avoid erasing different experiences of exploitation, racism, imperialism, white supremacy, state violence, and colonialism. Struggles against systems of oppression are intimately connected––but they are not a monolith.
We aim to cultivate a politics of autonomy, solidarity, and mutual aid, with a long-term, multi-generational horizon of decolonial, anti-capitalist, feminist, queer, and disability liberation. Drawing from the brilliance, love, and creativity we have for each other, we focus on the restoration and affirmation of ourselves and our neighbors. Resisting structural violence by fulfilling people’s needs provides an alternative, survivable system of care outside of the state and private industry.
7. ABOLITION
Individuals who are disabled, trans, undocumented, unsheltered, Black, Indigenous and/or people of color are often met with violence and criminalization when trying to meet their basic needs. Capitalism is dependent on theft, genocide, and the exploitation of the lands and lives of people of color worldwide. Serving the interests of a white supremacist, capitalist state, those in power, including police and politicians, legitimize, encourage, and sustain structural violence.
As a network, we not only seek to unlearn racial and colonial oppression and violence––we seek to eliminate it. We look to the work of Black and Indigenous abolitionists as we emphasize community care, restoration, and survivability. We forge a path to an abolitionist future by building neighborhood-based systems of care, embracing autonomy while affirming one another’s inherent value. In mutual aid, we recognize prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s words, “Where life is precious, life is precious.” To this end, we rely on each other as community members to ensure everyone’s needs are met. In doing so, we refuse to perpetuate legacies of racial and colonial oppression and violence, and instead operate outside of that framework.
8. PRACTICE, NOT PERFORMANCE
We do not hold space for savior complexes, virtue signaling, and performative activism. These behaviors are incompatible with mutual aid. A savior complex “is the assumption that wealth, whiteness, or other approximations to power imbue one with moral authority and the ability to ‘save’ oppressed peoples” (Mutual Aid Disaster Relief). This creates an exploitative co-dependent relationship. Those with savior complexes often desire to be considered a “good ally,” this is virtue signaling. You do not get “ally points” for redistributing resources—this mindset only reinforces the idea that those resources are for some people to give and some to receive, directly opposing the fundamentals of mutual aid.
We also reject performative activism––jumping in and claiming authority of the long-standing fights for the liberation of Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color. Performative activists turn these struggles into an extracurricular activity.
These behaviors do nothing to challenge dominant power structures. Instead of performance, we act in solidarity to cultivate a system of reciprocal care.
9. NO WHITE SUPREMACIST BEHAVIOR
We live under white supremacist, carceral, anti-Black, colonial, and imperialist systems. We cannot ignore that when organizing. We reject white supremacy both as an institution and a behavior.
Viewing white supremacy as strictly an institutional issue discounts the very real manifestations of white supremacy in our lives and communities. White supremacist behavior can be both overt and covert. Overt white supremacist behavior is easily recognizable in undisguised racism and acts of hate. But white supremacist behavior can also be covert, as we see in savior complexes, neoliberal co-option, respectability politics, performative allyship, and the dismissal of the voices and concerns of BIPOC.
This is particularly tied to our core values of solidarity, not charity, and communication and accountability. Our network looks to call in for accountability, which means we address white supremacy as soon as it manifests. We must center the experiences of those in our network who are directly harmed, while the rest of our community commits to a process of reconciliation and healing. This intentionally contrasts with more familiar systems of calling out, punishment, policing, incarceration, and disappearing.
References (in order of appearance):
M. Gouldhawke
Pandemics, Schools and Squats in a Civil Society Built on Stolen Land
Dylan Rodríguez
Covid-19 Pandemic as Carceral Revelation: Toward Abolitionist Counter-War
K. Agbebiyi
Prison Abolition FAQ
Fannie Lou Hamer
Speech Delivered at the Founding of the National Women’s Political Caucus
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind
Mutual Aid Disaster Relief
Mutual Aid Disaster Relief Workshop Facilitation Guide