Groups that ascribe to the notion of mutual aid have this potential, as mutual aid operates outside formal frameworks and places the emphasis on horizontality and equality. As the UK COVID-19 mutual aid website notes:
“Mutual aid is where a group of people organise to meet their own needs, outside of the formal frameworks of charities, NGOs and government. It is, by definition, a horizontal mode of organising, in which all individuals are equally powerful. There are no ‘leaders’ or unelected ‘steering committees’ in mutual aid projects; there is only a group of people who work together as equals. Mutual aid isn’t about “saving” anyone; it’s about people coming together, in a spirit of solidarity, to support and look out for one another.”
This has the potential to transform social relations and lead to deep shifts in political culture.
Of course, this more political understanding of mutual aid is not necessarily embraced by all the community groups that have registered themselves on the platform. For some, this may simply be a way to help vulnerable neighbours in a spirit of charity, which implies a more hierarchical relationship, where the ‘helpers’ are more powerful than the people they help.
I will come back to the political potential of COVID-19 mutual aid groups at the end of this article, after I provide more detail on how they organise and how they use digital media to do so.
Mutual Aid Groups and hyperlocal digital organising
It is difficult to identify the exact date when the first COVID-19 mutual aid group was created in the UK, but many of them were established around the 10 to 15 March 2020. There were call outs on Facebook and Twitter for people to launch a group in their locality by setting up a Facebook page or a Whatsapp group. People could then register the links to their Facebook or Whatsapp groups on a list compiled by Common Knowledge, a cooperative that designs digital tools for radical change. This database was later merged with the list of groups maintained on the national website for COVID-19 mutual aid groups, allowing visitors an easy way to find the group operating in their area.
But how were these localities defined? How did participants decide on the boundaries of their neighbourhood, particularly in large cities such as London? The maps of electoral wards were very useful in this respect as they allowed participants to use a ready-made framework for designating localities: the definition of mutual aid groups was based on the electoral geography of the UK.
Still, many groups servicing large electoral wards decided to break into ‘micro-groups’, focused on smaller neighbourhoods of the ward or even on specific streets. This is because, as the organising of mutual aid groups took off, participants realised that smaller is better: ‘micro-groups’ could get to know the needs of their specific area in granular detail and facilitate relationships between close neighbours. In areas where people did not know their immediate neighbours, this helped to establish trust as admitting your vulnerability and requesting help from strangers can be very challenging. Geographical closeness helped to moderate this fear.
Print
Anastasia Kavada | Radio Free (2020-06-12T09:55:53+00:00) Creating a hyperlocal infrastructure of care: COVID-19 Mutual Aid Groups. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/06/12/creating-a-hyperlocal-infrastructure-of-care-covid-19-mutual-aid-groups/
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