Iansá Magazine

By Saint Trey Wooden

Before I ever learned the word mutual aid, I knew what it meant to be fed by grief that did not ask for language. 

After my mother died, the world did not stop, but the block did. Friends, neighbors, kin not by blood but by something more enduring, showed up with foil-wrapped offerings, collard greens folded slow in smoked neckbone, cornbread soft enough to break at the mere thought of a knife. No procession, no sermon; just Mr. Kenny descending the steps of my house in Atlanta like it was nothing, like he hadn’t just handed me something holy. One hand on his hip, the other already reaching toward tomorrow. He placed care, still steaming, in my palm like it was a birthright. 

Where I’m from, love is rarely spoken. It’s driven, delivered, folded into tupperware. It’s the friend who sends money before you confess you need it. The cousin who says, “You ain’t sound like yourself, you good?” The gossip that turns into scripture on the porch. A ride there, and a ride back. It’s silence that listens better than prayer. We didn’t call it abolition. We didn’t write it down. But my God, it was our politic. 

Long before there were PDFs on how to build community, before the nonprofits discovered the words we’ve been living, we had systems. Woven, unwritten, fierce, and built out of need. Out of sweat and second helpings and “don’t worry, baby, I got you.” We didn’t call it utopia either. But 

maybe that’s what it was–a fugitive glimpse. A held breath of what could be, not forever, but enough. And isn’t that what revolution is, enough, practiced again and again, in the open palms of those who should’ve given up by now but didn’t? 

What if the blueprint isn’t buried in theory, but already alive in our group chats, in auntie’s kitchen, in the way we touch each other’s hair without asking why? What if survival isn’t the seed, but the flower, and we’ve been living in the bloom this whole time? To the people who bring plates before pain can speak. To the hands that hold the world without ceremony. To the ones who knew, long before any syllabus, how to keep each other alive. Because when the world forgets us, we remember us. And in that remembering, we build again.

We need to start here: mutual aid is not charity. It is not the warm fuzziness that comes from dropping off last season’s clothes at a shelter. Not the smiling board member posing with Black children. Not a grant-funded outreach program with a sunset clause and a white executive director. It is not performance, not optics, and not about saving people. Mutual aid is survival. It is redistribution without ego. The refusal to hoard what could be shared. It is what poor folks, Black folks, queer folks, undocumented folks have always done because there was no cavalry coming. Because the landlord didn’t care. Because the ER wouldn’t take you. Because the city had money for jails, not housing. 

The term became popular during the COVID-19 pandemic, when neighbors created networks to drop off groceries, cover rent, and keep each other alive. But the practice? It’s been here. Since slavery. Since the Middle Passage, since hush harbor prayers and Big Mama paying your light bill and telling no one. 

As Dean Spade writes,

Mutual aid is a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions.

It’s not just tending to needs, it’s building the kind of world where those needs aren’t neglected in the first place. It’s cultivating new social relations, new ways of being accountable when the state has already failed us. 

This work doesn’t come with a tax deduction. No gala dinners, and no PR campaign. The point isn’t to feel good, it’s to be good to each other in real, material, repeatable ways. And here’s the necessary boundary: mutual aid cannot be absorbed into the nonprofit industrial complex. The 

moment our survival is beholden to funders who benefit from our oppression, we’ve already lost. The moment we need permission to do what we’ve always done, we’ve severed our inheritance. This is not a trend in progressive organizing. This is ancestral memory. What our people built from the ruins. What grows in the cracks when we stop asking for crumbs and start feeding each other whole. Before it was called mutual aid, it was just what we do. 

The hush harbors weren’t just for prayer, they were for planning, sharing news, recipes, routes, and lullabies. Harriet didn’t walk those roads alone. She moved through a web of care, of signals passed through backdoors and bread crumbs left on porches. A fugitive network before Wi-Fi. Underground before it had a name. Our people built social infrastructure long before the state called us human. Enslaved Africans created maroon communities in the swamps of the Americas—free Black villages in defiance of empire. Not just escapes, but experiments in freedom, collective care, shared labor, mutual defense. 

The Black church was not just spiritual refuge, it was logistical. Children were raised by many hands. A deacon might pay your rent in quiet. A womanist theology lived long before it was written down. Tithes weren’t just for the pastor—they were for your cousin locked up, your grandmother behind on bills.

What of the women who cooked in bulk, not for profit, but for people? The barbers and beauticians who offered therapy with every press, every cut? The block captains and aunties who knew every schedule, every neighbor’s grief, and would cuss out city council with a Bible in one hand and your overdue rent notice in the other? 

We are not importing a foreign politic. This is Black knowledge, it is Black method. What Du Bois observed during Reconstruction wasn’t just political upheaval, it was Black folks pooling resources to build hospitals, co-ops, and defense committees out of the dust. 

We saw it again in the ’60s and ’70s: the Black Panther Party launched over 60 survival programs, free breakfast, free clinics, ambulance services. These weren’t stopgaps, they were sovereignty, and the government knew it. That’s why they dismantled them with more force than actual armed threats. 

The Combahee River Collective said, “If Black women were free, it would mean everyone else would have to be free.” That sentence isn’t just theory, it’s instruction. 

Because here’s the thing: every time the system failed, we did not. 

We built shadow economies, whisper networks, childcare collectives, block patrols, and beauty rituals that doubled as strategy. We hosted rent parties. We buried our dead with dignity even when we couldn’t afford to live. We turned grief into groove, poverty into pageantry. That, too, is mutual aid. That, too, is a radical lineage. 

It didn’t die with the Panthers. It didn’t vanish when the civil rights era was sterilized into soundbites. It moved into new bodies, new languages, and it braided itself into daily life until it became indistinguishable from love. 

I’ve seen it in the group chats. Middle of the night: “Y’all I’m not okay.” And within minutes, one person calls, another asks for a CashApp, another drops a meme heavy enough to break the silence; a reminder that joy and grief can dance together. These chats aren’t noise. They’re dispatch centers. Sacred threads where jokes and strategy live side by side. Where we trade herbal remedies, petition links, podcast episodes. Mutual aid, coded in Black vernacular, GIFs, timestamps. I’ve seen it in the kitchen. A friend gets laid off, says “I’m good”—but I show up with catfish and greens, because pride is louder than need. 

I’ve seen it at the beauty supply store, where strangers hype up a young Black girl learning how to lay her edges. In barbershop confessionals. In nail salons where the tech whispers, “Don’t worry baby, you still pretty,” while filing away what the world tried to break.

I’ve seen it in protest spaces: medics passing water, jail support crews waiting overnight, someone bringing snacks because screaming in the streets doesn’t mean you stopped being hungry. 

None of it funded. None of it regulated. And, it works. 

It’s not just crisis response. It’s continuity. A sense that you are seen, not out of obligation, but recognition: I know what it means to fall. 

We often romanticize revolution. But sometimes it looks like a ride to the clinic. A rent payment split across ten friends. A queer couple raising someone else’s child. A potluck where nobody’s alone for the holidays. These are our hood utopias. Not perfect places, chosen practices. Built by people who know no one’s coming to save us, so we save each other. Sweat-born, improvised, holy. Far more radical than a press release. 

And if we can build that in grief and eviction, what might we build if we were resourced? If we were trusted? We already know how to survive. The question now is: will we imagine beyond that? There is a truth we must speak plainly: not all of us are being held equally. 

Black women, Black trans people, disabled Black folks, poor mamas and aunties, those least protected have held us the most. They keep the group chat running, organize the rideshare, remember your therapist and your last heartbreak. They’ve buried too many, and keep showing up. We cannot build freedom on the backs of those still fighting to be seen. 

Too often, care becomes currency extracted from the vulnerable. We expect grace from the grieving. We crown people “strong” because we lean on them without asking. And sometimes, in resisting the violence of the state, we recreate it in miniature, failing to redistribute care as much as we redistribute critique. Who’s always organizing the healing circle but never makes it to one? 

In abolitionist and disability justice circles, there’s a phrase: “Access is love.” But also: redistribution is love. Reciprocity is love, and rest is love. Care is not renewable. It lives in bodies. If we don’t protect those who pour into others, we will lose them, and the world will grow sharper. 

I think often of the friends who held me through grief, breakups, the disorientation of being Black, queer, alive in America. I’ve shown up ragged and been received like I was holy. It humbles me. It reminds me: mutual aid is not just giving, it’s learning when to stop taking. 

Abolition is not just tearing down cages. It’s building something we’ve never fully seen: a world where safety isn’t surveillance, justice isn’t punishment, and care is not rationed by power. To care is to reject disposability. To look at someone broke, addicted, disabled, struggling and say:

you are still ours. Not once you prove it, but now and always. That’s what abolitionists mean when they say we keep us safe. Not that we become police, but possibility. 

I think of grassroots bail funds, street medics, housing collectives, community fridges, healing circles. Not dreams. Real. Often underfunded, and invisible; but real. 

In this light, care becomes infrastructure. Rebellion. A method, not a mood. 

What if our budgets reflected that? Not just money—but imagination? Yes, it’s messy. Yes, it’s slow. But perfection is not the point. The point is: we do not give up on each other. That is abolition, that is mutual aid, and that is a kind of freedom not yet fully born, but already breathing in the cracks. 

I come back to Mr. Kenny on my steps. Foil-wrapped plate in hand. Walking away like it was nothing. Like he hadn’t just offered me sanctuary in the shape of supper. There was no ceremony. No saviorism. Just presence, just practice. That was a political act, that was abolition in motion. A Black man refusing to let another Black man suffer alone. We don’t need grants to do that. We just need to remember who we’ve always been to each other. What we call mutual aid, our grandmothers called being decent. What we call abolition, the hood has been doing for generations. 

So maybe the revolution isn’t on the horizon, it’s already in our hands. Maybe the future isn’t distant, it’s a table we’ve already set. A recipe we’ve already memorized. A rhythm we already know by heart. The sacred is in the small—in who gets the last piece of cornbread, in who calls when your voice sounds off, and in who stays. 

We don’t need a roadmap to liberation. We just need each other. And, we need to protect what we’ve already built in the margins. These hood utopias, these refusal rituals, these soft, strong, everyday acts of love. Because the world we deserve will not come from theory alone. It will be made by us, plate by plate, text by text, hand by trembling hand.