Many Vermont mutual aid efforts born during Covid-19 continue their work – VTDigger

Residents of the South Meadows neighborhood in Burlington gather free produce from the Peoples Farmstand on June 30. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger

Toward the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, one thing was made quickly and strikingly clear: To survive a crisis, people need each other. For the thousands of Vermonters who helped galvanize a swell of grassroots mutual aid efforts that year, that was a reality worth acting upon.

Since then, roughly one third of those groups have continued operating in Vermont, responding to crises that have continued beyond the flashpoint of the early pandemic, according to research conducted by VTDigger.

The term Mutual aid refers to local networks through which people crowdsource and redistribute food, supplies, skills, money and other resources on a grassroots level.

With origins in Black and Indigenous liberation movements and anarchist theory, mutual aid networks often arise explicitly in response to the failures of established systems to support people, according to Linus Owens, a professor of sociology at Middlebury College.

While organizers and participants vary in their personal political perspectives on the practice, mutual aid traditionally involves non-hierarchical and reciprocal forms of organizing aimed explicitly at disrupting the unequal power dynamics that mainstream forms of charity often reinforce.

Almost always in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, rather than people turning against each other, we see a kind of flowering or proliferation of neighbors taking care of neighbors, strangers taking care of strangers, Owens said. But it doesnt necessarily last super long.

Before 2020, only a handful of mutual aid networks existed in Vermont. Yet as Vermonters sought more ways to meet each others needs during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns, 50 new groups burgeoned across the state, mirroring a national surge in the radical practices mainstream popularity.

By the middle of 2020, at least 53 distinct networks were operating across all 14 counties, according to a survey conducted by VTDigger.

Since then, 21 of the networks VTDigger identified have closed. Another 13 showed signs of having shut down, like a lack of active internet presence. Others have become less consistently active, rekindling energy during new crises, such as this summers historic flooding.

Five additional mutual aid networks began operating between 2021 and 2023. All of those, plus nearly one-third of the networks that were founded in 2020, have operated steadily since then, continuing or shifting their focus toward ongoing crises, such as poverty, homelessness and racism, which acute crises intensify.

At the Marketplace Garage one summer afternoon in Burlington, dozens of people gathered around containers of salad and homemade mac and cheese. As people talked and ate, someone began playing music. Burlington resident Alex Olsen requested the song The Greatest by Sia and started dancing.

Just weeks before, Olsen was among the 800 Vermonters who were evicted from the states pandemic-era hotel and motel programs. Amid the tumult, Olsen said, Food Not Cops was a constant source of caloric and social nourishment.

Food Not Cops, a grassroots mutual aid group that ignited in 2020 as a Burlington offshoot of Food Not Bombs, began when a swell of volunteers many of whom experienced food insecurity themselves began cooking meals to distribute outside daily. Food Not Cops continues to host free lunches daily, making it one of several mutual aid groups in Vermont whose work has not ended.

Sam Bliss, an organizer at Food Not Cops, said the pandemic and coinciding Black Lives Matter protests that summer were examples of how acute crises can illuminate how, on an everyday basis, the state fails to meet peoples needs.

Food Not Cops is prefigurative, which means were creating the world that we want to live in, right here as best we can, Bliss said.

In the world that Food Not Cops imagines, receiving free food is not shameful but liberating. While organizers encourage people experiencing food insecurity to join meals, they also hope those with more resources will as well.

(There are) benefits of food being a gift in terms of the sorts of relationships that it creates and the community resilience that come from those relationships, Bliss said.

While participation in Food Not Cops has decreased since a surge in 2020, Bliss said, specifically among members of the white middle and upper classes, its daily meals are part of a growing grassroots effort to provide free food, especially as pandemic-era programs like Everyone Eats and extra SNAP benefits have ended.

Once the pandemic started, the need for food and meals just went way up, said FaRied Munarsyah, a member of the Peoples Kitchen, another mutual aid group that has distributed weekly free meals in Burlington since 2012. The world was ending, but we were thriving. I dont know what that means for the world were living in.

Food Not Cops isnt the only group that has struggled with consistent community participation since pandemic restrictions were lifted and many people with the resources to do so returned to their previous lives and schedules.

Stacy Raphael, a Vergennes resident who organized with Addison County Mutual Aid, and Kim Souza, who worked with The Upper Valley Response Team, described the increasing lack of volunteers free time that foreshadowed the end of their networks activity. Members of Winooski Mutual Aid announced their decision to dissolve in April 2022, citing similar reasons.

But for Raphael, the spirit of mutual aid is still present in Addison County, even though its formal structure has fallen away.

I would argue that in a million different ways, it was like creating an underground root system. Everywhere we look, manifestations of mutual aid pop up, Raphael said.

Part of the legacy of mutual aid in Vermont might be connected to how it has resurfaced when new crises strike, Raphael said. When floods devastated Vermont in July, Vermonters mobilized mutual aid responses by the first night of the storm. Similarly, when Vermonters were evicted from the states motel program this summer, people turned to mutual aid.

However, activist Brenda Siegel said Vermonters neighborly desires to help one another dont always transcend their conscious or unconscious social bigotry.

What we often see is that Vermonters are like, we love to come together and help our neighbors, and actually, in this (eviction) crisis, that is not whats happening, Siegel said over the summer. Towns themselves are rejecting people and telling them they dont even deserve to sleep somewhere, even in a tent. Thats making mutual aid a lot harder.

At Food Not Cops, things have also felt harder and more thankless, Bliss said last month, describing how a shrinking volunteer base, colder weather, increased homelessness and other factors have strained peoples capacity to show up to one another.

To keep going, he said, mutual aid requires sustained commitment beyond moments of extreme crisis, from people with capacity and time. Otherwise, networks can be crushed by the same systemic struggles they work to resist.

Theres always edible food thats not sellable, (but) if it turns out that crucial resource of (peoples) time is no longer available eventually (Food Not Cops) will be one more thing that started during Covid that no longer exists, Bliss said.

Maeve McCurdy, a coordinator with Old North End Mutual Aid, said many of her groups challenges reflect needs that have only intensified along class lines as state-run responses to the pandemic have expired.

Old North End Mutual Aid began in spring 2020, initially as a disaster-response group, McCurdy said. The group circulates an online request form, summarizes peoples requests, and then invites responses from community members via email and Instagram.

Early in the pandemic, McCurdy said it was common for Old North End Mutual Aid to receive smaller requests from people across the economic board. But now, she said, the requests have gotten bigger, increasing from asks for $50 to requests for thousands.

The number of requests has also increased over time, which caused the group to temporarily close their form in late October to catch up on responding to inquiries. The network received a total of 197 requests in 2020, 432 in 2021 and 567 in 2022. McCurdy said the group has responded to 215 requests and redistributed thousands of dollars so far this year.

I think, in an ideal world, people wouldnt have to go to mutual aid for housing or food but could go there for help with a gardening project, McCurdy said. Anecdotally, I would say a lot of the requests were getting right now are for housing.

As Owens, the Middlebury professor, put it, everyone wanted to get back to normal (after Covid-19), but for a lot of people, normal wasnt great.

For Owens, McCurdy and other members of active mutual aid groups in Vermont, the social, political and environmental crises that Covid-19 helped illuminate did not end when the pandemic purportedly did. Instead, they said, these crises are ongoing and deeply connected to the normal reality that the pandemic itself disrupted.

For these organizers, mutual aid belongs both in a utopian world and also along the road to get there.

I think it both over-inflates the success of the current system and under-inflates the value of mutual aid to write it off as something that (only) works in (acute) crisis, Owens said. Mutual aid asks the question of (whether) we can be more or less autonomous, more or less free.

In Vermont, examples of mutual aid have flourished long before the terms recent surge in popularity from the labor radicalism of Barres granite workers in the 1920s to volunteers formation of a fund for abortion access in 2002 to Migrant Justices formation of a solidarity collective in 2009.

Historically, mutual aid has most often developed in communities neglected or criminalized by the state, according to Zion Wilcox, an activist who organized at the 2020 Battery Park encampment in Burlington.

Despite mutual aid often being viewed as an Anarchist concept with communist origin, Black and brown communities across the globe have practiced it in the past, Wilcox wrote in an Instagram message to VTDigger.

The Black Panthers and other unions of color were (and still are) criminalized and targeted for practicing mutual aid, which often is not included in this conversation of mutual aid history, Wilcox said. The legacy of mutual aid as a form of resistance cultivated in communities of color continues in Vermont, where many organizers see it as essential to justice movements.

On Nov. 4, at a rally in Battery Park in support of a cease-fire in Gaza, Burlington resident Nour El-Naboulsi, of the Peoples Farmstand, spoke about his relationship to mutual aid as a Palestinian American.

(At the Peoples Farmstand,) we want to show our refugee neighbors, our neighbors of color, our houseless neighbors, our queer neighbors, that you are welcome here and you are loved, El-Naboulsi said, standing on a stage before about 1,200 protesters, to the left of a Peoples Kitchen pop-up.

As a Palestinian, Ive felt alone and out of place my whole life, El-Naboulsi said. To see my community come out in support like this helps me get out of bed in the morning.

Lydia Diamond, another longtime organizer with the Peoples Kitchen, was one of the children who received breakfast from the Black Panthers free breakfast program one of the most famous and large-scale examples of mutual aid as a kid growing up in Brooklyn.

Now, Diamond carries on that legacy each week while distributing food at South Meadow and Baird Street in Burlington.

Food insecurity was one of the things that people struggled with immensely during the pandemic, and it hasnt changed, Diamond said in June. I love to invite folks to come and hang out with us and see what we do. Its a mutual aid of love as well.

For organizers who explicitly choose to describe their work using the term mutual aid, the question of what distinguishes the practice from charity is often important. For some, the practice cannot be separated from its radical political roots.

Theres no activism without mutual aid, said Mohamed Shariff, who organized mutual aid efforts at the 2020 Battery Park protests. You cannot be a person who is fighting for anything righteous without mutual aid.

Yet, even as organizers navigate theoretical positions, many of them agree that the line between charity and mutual aid is often, in practice, blurry. This distinction can be a matter of language, according to Bethany Dunbar, an organizer with Hardwick Area Neighbor to Neighbor.

Some folks would call something charity that someone else might call mutual aid, Dunbar said, I like the notion of mutual aid as a way to (organize). It does seem more egalitarian.

Helen Beattie, who organizes alongside Dunbar, said that the Hardwick network takes particular care to minimize hierarchy in their group. Yet, to her, mutual aid is apolitical and fundamental to life, especially in a rural community.

For others, practicing mutual aid involves resisting the way that charity and nonprofits can reinforce power dynamics and offer an excuse for (governments) to do less, as McCurdy of Old North End Mutual Aid said.

Charity, in (radical leftist) mutual aid circles is like a bad word because a lot of elements of charity are really condescending (and) just recreate systems of need, said Rachel Siegel, a co-founder of Old North End Mutual Aid. But when peoples needs are unmet, she said, sometimes charity is better than no charity.

Middlebury resident Andrs Oyaga spoke about mutual aid efforts run through Conscious Homestead. In 2020, the homestead began distributing CSA-style Community Care Shares among Vermonters who are Black, Indigenous and people of color whose experience of the pandemic was compounded by systemic oppression. According to Oyaga, the homestead doesnt resemble a charity at all its a community.

Its a really special place where people in the diaspora connect and support one another on an emotional (and) spiritual level, but also in a very material way, Oyaga said.

According to Meghan Wayland and Michael Reddy, of Northeast Kingdom Organizing who both identify as anarchists, mutual aid is always political, but it doesnt always need to be spoken about that way.

Its refreshing when its perceived as apolitical because, for me, strategically, it will always be political, Wayland said.

Traditions of mutual aid such as barn-raising, communal haying and responding to snowstorms have existed in rural Vermont for a long time, according to Reddy. Practices of mutual aid (have the potential to) transcend political divisions, which are themselves fomented and utilized by (structures of) power to undermine the power of the grassroots, Reddy said.

As Reddy, Wayland and several other organizers put it, the outpouring of mutual aid that the pandemic catalyzed in Vermont tended to peoples visceral and immediate needs for food, housing and connection.

Simultaneously, they said, it did and continues to do something that is far less easy to quantify by compelling thousands of Vermonters to imagine and act upon the idea that our social ecosystems can and should be different.

(Our) economic system tries to commodify everything, whether its the relationships you have, the content you make (online), or the carbon in the air, Reddy said. Mutual aid (posits) a different way of doing things that isnt based on commodification. I think well need it more as natural disasters or man-made disasters or capitalist-made disasters continue to proliferate.

Correction: An earlier version of a photo caption misspelled Nour El-Naboulsis name.

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Many Vermont mutual aid efforts born during Covid-19 continue their work - VTDigger