Mutual aid groups help when services fail
On the evening of Feb. 16, Shelly Baker, a lead organizer with mutual aid group Say Her Name TX, had already begun delivering hot meals and water to community members after 1.3 million Houstonians found themselves without power, heat or drinkable water in sub-freezing temperatures. Houston was still in the dark, and the roads were unsafe. Ashanté M. Reese, an organizer living in Austin, noticed her efforts, told her of a household in Houston in need, and the two women were able to coordinate a successful delivery that evening.
This moment would spark the growth of seven food and water distributions hosted by our organizations, Mutual Aid Houston, Say Her Name TX and the Houston chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America from Feb. 18-21. Collectively, we coordinated over 300 volunteers to serve over 5,000 people with $35,000 worth of food, water and essential household goods, and would receive 3,000 virtual applications for $100 emergency payments through direct aid.
While churches, businesses, nonprofits and ordinary people across Houston provided critical help to those in need during the winter storm, our organizations are different. We are part of the long-standing movement of mutual aid based on solidarity — building trust between neighbors around common struggle — that is gaining national attention and momentum. It requires lasting relationships to quickly respond to our communities’ needs and sharing the abundance of what we have with our neighbors.
For many who are unfamiliar with the purpose of mutual aid, it can seem similar to delivering public services that already exist. But city and county services are often inaccessible to people due to convoluted eligibility requirements and means testing to only serve those with the highest need. Without mutual aid, many Houstonians affected by Winter Storm Uri would have been left without water, food and hope.
Mutual aid empowers communities to organize themselves when governments fail to provide essential goods and services. But these efforts are just a BandAid in the face of centuries of systemic injustice. The money we’ve given out will likely find its way back into the hands of some companies profiting greatly from residents’ skyrocketing energy bills and landlords who are still filing to evict tenants during an ongoing pandemic, despite a CDC moratorium on evictions. And we will not be able to stop the cascade of catastrophes that will continue without sweeping reform to our environmental and energy policy.
We’re spreading the word about our efforts because we need Houstonians on our side. We’re not only stepping up where the government can’t, but we’re listening and learning about what needs to change in our city — how we can lift up and empower our communities. The need is more than we can handle alone; we have to do this together.
At the first distribution site in Second Ward on Feb. 17, we ran out of water in 30 minutes. The next day, representatives from our groups came together to determine how we could increase the scale of our distributions by leveraging each of our organizations’ networks. While on the ground, we worked with Blackled organizations like Our Afrikan Family and organizers who brought donations and coordinated their own networks.
At Kelly Court Apartments in Fifth Ward, we gathered anyone we could to knock on doors and let people know about the ongoing distribution effort. They were surprised we were out there and excited to be the ones who could support the people in their own neighborhood. One woman we helped said, “It’s amazing that we can get help with no red tape.”
Through organizers’ hard work to spread the word, we were able to grow the number of people we served. Amid the crisis, volunteer bases for all groups grew as well: over half of the volunteers we recruited at our sites had never volunteered during a natural disaster before. But as organizers, it was difficult to feel anything other than that the burden of taking care of our communities was on us alone. We had taken action to serve the needs of the community days before the city and county governments were able to offer monetary assistance.
The scope of the aid we delivered during the freeze was exponentially more than we had done in previous grassroots initiatives, but the foundation for our efforts was years in the making. Some of the groups who supported our distributions, like Democratic Socialists of America, had been running political campaigns in the Houston area for years; others, like Mutual Aid Houston and Say Her Name TX, sprang up in resistance to police violence against Black Houstonians following the protests in June 2020. Each of our organizations came together to participate in efforts by the Houston Abolitionist Collective, which unites mutual aid providers, prison abolitionists and racial justice advocates. The collective has organized call-in campaigns to support defunding prisons and police, and most recently created an informational zine that is on display at the MFAH exhibit Rewrite the World.
As the city moves forward, our work continues. Locally, repair and supply work by fellow organizers at groups like West Street Recovery continue. Democratic Socialists of America is organizing statewide mobilizations around the Green New Deal. Mutual Aid Houston is continuing to fill requests for direct aid and will have distributed $500,000 in direct aid due to the Texas Freeze. Say Her Name TX continues to coordinate resources, including by trucking in supplies from Virginia and fielding requests for direct assistance. We’ll continue to support our fellow organizers in helping seek liberation for Black communities and fight for the underfed and underresourced. We’ve seen enough on the ground, and we’re prepared to create the world we envision with mutual aid and strong communities at its core.