While mutual aid traditions extend far back in US history, for some Americans, COVID marked the first time they had heard of mutual aid, the work of people coming together to voluntarily meet each other’s needs. Mutual aid can include the bartering of services or goods; or the free exchange of items, from cooking meals or delivering food, to clothing drives, prescription pickups, home repair, or childcare.

As work and schools returned to in-person, and some pre-pandemic routines resumed thanks to vaccinations, people had less time to volunteer. Some may have believed there was less need.

One mutual aid group, East Brooklyn Mutual Aid, saw about a 70 percent decrease in volunteers by late 2021. Mere months into the pandemic, NPR reported on several mutual aid groups in Washington, DC who “had to reduce the frequency of deliveries or cut back on certain forms of support because their funding has waned.”

Participation in mutual aid networks may be declining, but demand for the kind of help these networks provide, from financial aid to food assistance, persists. A 2023 study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that the percentage of Americans who experienced food insecurity in these first few years of COVID may have been underestimated by up to one-third. Simply put, the need for neighbors to help neighbors is not going away any time soon.

Food insecurity, defined as not having consistent access to sufficient food to meet basic needs, continues to be an urgent issue for many Americans, with the Center for American Progress reporting that during one month in 2022, “almost 24 million households—including 11.6 million households with children under the age of 18—reported that they sometimes or often did not have enough to eat during the week. More than seven million households were food insecure despite receiving federal food and nutrition benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and almost four million of these households included children.”

Early pandemic-era emergency bans on evictions have lapsed, as have support measures for families such as the monthly payments from the expanded child tax credit, which expired in December 2021.

In the face of continued difficulties, one would hope that mutual aid networks would be as strong as ever, but the reality is that not all mutual aid groups and networks will be sustained. Some groups, such as BSS, have been distributing the last of their donations. Others have stopped operations or plan to disband.

Read the full article about mutual aid by Alison Stine at Nonprofit Quarterly.