What Is Mutual Aid? A Complete Guide for 2026

Mutual aid is people helping each other. Not charity — where someone with power gives to someone without it — but solidarity, where people with shared needs pool resources and take care of each other.

The concept is as old as humanity. What's new in 2026 is the scale: over 1,000 mutual aid groups operate across the United States, coordinating food distributions, emergency funds, housing support, immigration assistance, and community organizing — mostly through cobbled-together free tools that weren't built for them.

The distinction matters:

• Charity flows downward. Someone with resources gives to someone without. The giver decides what to give, when, and to whom. Power stays concentrated.
• Mutual aid flows laterally. Everyone is both a giver and a receiver. The community decides together how resources are shared. Power is distributed.

As scholar Dean Spade writes in Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next): 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.”

Based on our research across hundreds of groups, most mutual aid networks follow a similar pattern:

1. Someone identifies a need — a community member can't pay rent, a neighborhood needs groceries, a disaster hits.
2. A group forms — usually through social media, a Signal group, or an in-person meeting. Often during a crisis (COVID-19 spawned 800+ groups in weeks).
3. Money gets collected — typically through Venmo, CashApp, PayPal, or GoFundMe. Usually into one person's personal account.
4. Resources get distributed — groceries delivered, rent paid, supplies purchased. Volunteers coordinate through Signal, Slack, or group chats.
5. The group either sustains or dissolves — groups that build governance structures survive. Groups where one person holds all the money and makes all the decisions burn out.

Mutual aid groups are running critical community infrastructure on tools designed for splitting brunch tabs. The research is clear on the pain:

• Venmo and PayPal freeze accounts when they detect “business activity” on personal accounts. Covid Bail Out NYC couldn't bail out more than 5 people per week due to Venmo's $6,999/week transfer limit.^[1]
• GoFundMe can return all funds to donors without explanation. The Sameer Project lost $250,000 raised for Gaza relief when GoFundMe shut down their campaign in 2024.^[2]
• The person whose Venmo holds the money gets a 1099-K from the IRS treating all group funds as their personal income. The threshold is $600.^[3]
• Google Sheets don't scale for tracking requests, distributions, and finances across a growing group.
• Governance defaults to “whoever shows up” — the SELC Legal Toolkit warns that without explicit structures, groups fall into “unwritten rules, friendship cliques, and popularity contests.”

The 2025 CHI research paper “It Actually Doesn't Feel Very Mutual” found that existing technology actively erodes mutual aid values — centralizing power, reducing solidarity, and creating surveillance risks.

1. Start with a specific need. Don't create a group looking for a purpose. Respond to something real — a neighbor who needs groceries, a community facing evictions, a disaster.
2. Keep it small. 10-20 active members is enough to start. You can grow later.
3. Establish governance early. Decide how money decisions get made before money arrives. “When groups that have been all-volunteer get money, they often fall apart in conflict about that money” (Dean Spade).
4. Use transparent tools. Every member should be able to see the treasury balance and how funds are spent.
5. Distribute power. No single person should hold all the money, make all the decisions, or be the only one who knows how things work.

The mutual aid landscape is evolving rapidly:

• Immigration enforcement has reactivated COVID-era networks. Minneapolis, Kansas City, LA, Chicago, and Virginia all have active ICE Watch mutual aid operations.
• 600+ collectives lost their fiscal host when Open Collective Foundation dissolved in December 2024, creating urgent demand for alternative financial infrastructure.
• Wildfire mutual aid groups formed after the January 2025 LA fires, with established networks like MALAN pivoting to disaster response.
• Over 1,300 worker cooperatives now operate in the US, growing 34% since 2020^[4] — many emerging from mutual aid origins.

Goodkeep maintains a directory of 529+ mutual aid groups across 49 states. Search by city, state, or focus area to find your community — or claim your group's profile if it's already listed.