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By “this stuff,” he meant mutual aid, in which members of a community work together to meet each other’s urgent needs. Normally, the day laborers and domestic workers who are members of his organization, New Immigrant Community Empowerment (NICE), work together on direct-action campaigns to fight exploitation and advocate for their rights. But the pandemic has pushed them into organizing mutual aid around food.

They are not alone. In recent months, members of progressive direct-action organizations have developed new systems for checking on their neighbors, dropping off food and medicine, providing protective personal equipment to incarcerated family members, and giving cash to those suddenly unemployed to meet immediate rent, food, and medical needs. At the same time, they’re continuing to press for workers’ rights and proper health care during the pandemic, as well as ensure access to federal stimulus money for individuals and small minority-owned businesses.

In so doing, these organizations are harkening back to their roots: people creating social ties by helping each other out, and those ties fueling collective fights for new systems and policies.

Combining mutual aid and direct action might seem like common sense, but in today’s corporatized and professionalized nonprofit world, this model had disappeared almost completely. Community-based nonprofits in the United States today are split into distinct silos, with service provision firmly compartmentalized in one box and direct-action organizing in another.

The roots of this split lie in the increasing professionalization of the sector over half a century, driven by no small amount of sexism, classism and racism.

Throughout American history, mutual aid societies existed wherever poor, disenfranchised people could be found, particularly Black, Indigenous, and immigrant communities. Chinese immigrants of the 19th century formed networks to defend against xenophobic violence and to fund their businesses when banks refused. Native Americans formed urban community centers in the 1950s and 1960s after the government terminated the rights of more than 100 tribes, forcing people off traditional lands across the Great Plains as well as California, Texas, New York, Florida, Oregon, Wisconsin, and Montana. These urban centers provided employment support, housing assistance, and health care, creating both the material and political conditions for self-determination.

During and immediately after slavery, free Black people formed mutual aid societies to provide resources denied them by the white community. The first was the Free African Society of Philadelphia, founded in the 1770s to provide a place to worship and financial resources to members. Similar organizations soon sprung up in Philadelphia, New York, New Orleans and Newport, Rhode Island, providing non-denominational spiritual guidance and resources such as banks, schools, burial societies, newspapers, food, support for widows and orphans, and more. W.E.B. DuBois called these “the first wavering step of a people toward organized social life.”

These organizations were a threat to the racial status quo. Charleston shut down the Free Dark Men of Color in the 1820s for fear of slave insurrections and Maryland made it a felony to join a mutual aid society in 1842. Despite the crackdowns, thousands more societies formed after the Civil War, making enormous gains for Black communities. Decades later, these self-organized groups would become the infrastructure of the Civil Rights Movement and the inspiration for the Black Panthers, who famously served up free breakfasts and health programs alongside their fight against police brutality and exploitation of Black communities.

European immigrant communities of the 19th and 20th centuries, too, relied on cooperative efforts that helped their members learn English, find decent housing, and resist labor abuse. Incorporating a mix of mutual aid, community organizing, and legislative campaigning, the social reformer Jane Addams founded Chicago’s Hull House in 1889, sparking a movement that counted more than 400 “settlement houses” within 20 years. Addams had been inspired by visiting an English settlement house where she saw boundaries of language, class status, and religious affiliation stretching and blurring. In the United States, settlement houses were community arts centers, social service providers, and civic action committees all rolled into one.

Formalizing social work for white people began with the settlement houses. In the late 1890s, Addams’ training of settlement house volunteers became the basis of early social work college programs. Settlement house workers increasingly felt the need for credentials because the medical doctors and lawyers who intervened in the lives of poor families routinely ignored the insights of the volunteers, mostly well-off white women, whom they perceived as amateurs. Early training programs were practical, such as the 1904 partnership between Columbia University and the New York School of Philanthropy. In 1915, medical educator Dr. Abraham Flexner critiqued social work as lacking professionalism of the sort that’s found in medicine, law, and preaching, and labeled social workers as “narrow minded technicians.” Colleges then began to push curricula that would elevate the “theory” of social work rather than the practice.

The settlement houses, meanwhile, continued their social reform projects, including sanitation reform, women’s suffrage, temperance, legislation against child labor, and labor law. Movement leaders such as labor advocate Frances Perkins wrote many of these ideas into the New Deal. In the throes of the Great Depression, the Social Security Act of 1935 created pensions for the elderly, care for the disabled, a state-run medical insurance program for the poor, and unemployment insurance. But the legislation also reflected the prevailing racism of the time, excluding domestic and farm workers in a compromise that ensured that Southern Democrats and the agricultural industry would continue to have access to cheap labor. Left to fend for themselves, those communities, largely comprised of people of color, continued to rely on mutual aid even as they tried to organize for change.

In this April 16, 1969 photograph, Bill Whitfield, member of the Black Panther chapter in Kansas City, serves free breakfast to children before they go to school. Courtesy of William P. Straeter/Associated Press.

At the same time, Black social work traditions grew out of mutual aid organizations, added journalism to the practice, and for decades had a testy relationship with the white social work establishment. Leaders like Mary Church Terrell, Anna Julia Cooper and Mary Jane Patterson founded the Colored Women’s League in 1892 to generate racial uplift through self-help. Thyra J. Edwards, virtually unknown in mainstream social work history, was also a trained journalist. These women made lynching their top priority.

Despite political action among social workers of all races, Saul Alinsky is the white man credited with codifying the social action elements. Starting in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood in the 1930s, Alinsky eventually became the nation’s most famous “community organizer” with his approach of starting with local issues in order to rally people to fight for broader political change. He described this approach in his 1971 book Rules for Radicals: “They organize to get rid of four-legged rats and stop there; we organize to get rid of four-legged rats so we can get on to removing two-legged rats.” Alinsky built the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), one of the largest and most powerful organizing networks of the 20th century, uniting churches, ethnic associations, and neighborhood groups in direct-action campaigns. It was an IAF affiliate in Baltimore, for example, that won the first local Living Wage law in 1994, the precursor to today’s “Fight for $15.”

The Alinsky model came to dominate the way activists were trained and organized. It featured highly professionalized, well-paid organizers who kept any radical politics to themselves in the name of people power. The IAF also had a distinctly male culture. Alinsky expected organizers to work around the clock; women, he thought, were too delicate, even if he didn’t publicly discourage them from the work.

Alinsky’s influential “rules” saw services—mostly organized by and provided by women—only as a means to direct action campaigning. The goal was to deliver “winnable” material improvements as well as change the relations of power between everyday people and the institutions that shaped their lives. Described as “non-ideological,” this model characterized membership-based community organizations for many years. But over time, organizers who were women and people of color have disrupted and changed that norm, arguing that racism, sexism and capitalism would never be challenged under these conditions.

In any case, the split between providing services and advocating for systemic change had long been established in the U.S. When the National Association of Social Workers was formed in 1955, providing services via casework and organizing for systemic change had become distinct streams of social work. By 1960, they had their own tracks at various universities. Funding patterns followed. Philanthropists, too, viewed these functions as separate, driving far more resources to apoliticized service provision than they did to community organizing. When I was learning to organize in the late 1980s, I was consistently told that self-help schemes, lending circles, and cooperative businesses had little to do with “real” organizing.

Today, though, a new generation of activists is erasing that distinction.

The pandemic, in particular, has clarified that organizing cannot be divorced from actually helping people. In March, on a webinar about race and COVID-19, the moderator asked us panelists, “What inspires you?” I applauded all the self-organized mutual aid schemes and noted that prominent organizing networks have jumped in, including the Center for Popular Democracy, People’s Action, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Black Lives Matter, United We Dream, Faith in Action, and Make the Road, among many others. All are responding to the immediate needs of their constituencies—food, masks, money, help navigating government assistance—and diverging from their pre-coronavirus activities. Another panelist countered: “But mutual aid can’t solve this crisis at scale. Only government can do that.” Some activists fear that politicians will try to replace government care with community care, or that mutual aid will absorb all of our energy, leaving nothing for political fights.

But especially in times when the state dramatically fails to deliver what people need, mutual aid is a powerful way, sometimes even the only way, to help people manage daily life while sustaining their spirits in the struggle for systemic change. Organizing requires courage; courage comes from community. Mutual aid fuels the audacity to demand more because it reinforces that we are not alone in our suffering.

Chai Moua, the Civic Engagement Director at Freedom, Inc, a 17-year-old coalition of Black and Southeast Asian groups in Wisconsin, told me that her organization has been ready for this moment. “We have always believed in combining service and organizing to get to a bigger future,” she said. “Our food pantry is actually part of our civic engagement work. We’re not just giving you food but showing systematically ‘this is why our folks don’t have access to healthy food,’ and then changing those systems.”

The United States, and perhaps the world, is at the beginning of a string of fundamental shifts in culture, politics, economy and daily life. The combined disruption of an ongoing deadly pandemic, record unemployment, and multiracial uprisings to defend Black lives will soon make many of our existing models irrelevant. Photos of sophisticated mutual aid operations at recent Black Lives Matter protests powerfully symbolize the future of organizing, protest, and direct action. Everyone is discovering what some of us have always understood: The social ties cultivated by mutual aid are the same ties needed to fuel a historic boycott, a union organizing drive, or a campaign to close down prisons. Our ancestors knew this well, and now we do too.

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It’s possible, though, to create a physical space that brings writers and readers together to share the transformative power of storytelling. That can look like a library—or it can look like Open Book, with its theater-style marquee beckoning Minneapolis denizens from all walks of life to come in and explore the world of words.

1011 South Washington Avenue is a prominent part of the hottest corner of downtown Minneapolis, with high-rises containing condos offering a view over Gold Medal Park to the historic Stone Arch Bridge crossing the Mississippi River. It took vision, though, to imagine a scenario like this when Open Book opened in 2000. “The neighborhood was empty,” says Britt Udesen, now the executive director of the Loft Literary Center. “Unless you wanted to go to Liquor Depot, there was nothing here.”

Open Book is a hub of the Twin Cities’ literary life and an inviting space for literary projects. The facility is a path-breaking collaboration among three nonprofit organizations: the publisher Milkweed Editions, the education-oriented Loft Literary Center, and the Minnesota Center for Book Arts (MCBA).

It took all three organizations, with the help of some heavy lifting from civic leaders and varied donors, to create Open Book: a space that supports the local and national literary communities, making the three more than the sum of their parts.

Beyond Open Book’s inviting entrance, a high-ceilinged space with exposed brick walls and wood beams features a coffee shop and a Milkweed-run bookstore, as well as the entrance to MCBA’s gallery space and gift shop. A staircase offers access to a second-floor space with classrooms, public gathering space, and offices. Even more spaces are on a third floor.

“We get people stopping in because of the space or to shop downstairs, and then realizing that this could be a place where there’s more than a shopping experience for them,” says Udesen. “We have tens of thousands of visitors over the course of a year that we wouldn’t get if we weren’t on a busy street in a busy neighborhood.”

Open Book is a destination for book lovers who come in from as far as the outer suburbs, from greater Minnesota, or even from across the country to meet authors at the Loft or browse Milkweed’s selection of nationally-praised publications. It’s also, though, a center for its neighborhood community. It’s a polling place, it hosts theatrical productions, and neighbors come from areas like the nearby Cedar-Riverside community—home to many Somali immigrants—to join book clubs or take classes.

Daniel Slager, publisher and CEO at Milkweed, says that “our store and the Center for Book Arts store benefit from people who are coming in to take Loft classes, or people who are just coming in to use the building. That’s the kind of cross-pollination that the founders of the building were hoping for.”

Nearly 20 years ago the three founding partners got together and made the case that securing a center for the literary arts was an investment that would pay off. Together, the partners raised $8 million to buy three standalone buildings that were then unused, and undertook to turn them into what became Open Book. “There are only so many towns where you could raise that kind of money for a literary center,” observes Slager.

Open Book offers its tenants not only visibility and community, but also a measure of protection from the vagaries of the commercial real estate market. “One of the ideas behind creating Open Book,” says Slager, “was to create a situation where each of the founding partner organizations had below-market rent in perpetuity. That also applies to our bookstore space: it would be challenging for us to afford that kind of storefront space in our part of town.”

The stability of Open Book derives in part from its collaborative organizational model: the facility operates as an independent nonprofit, with board representation from all three of the founding partners. The organization has a single employee: a general manager for the facility. Open Book rents the building’s additional space to outside companies wanting to office there. “We work together and support each other’s work—that feels unbelievably nurturing and supportive,” says Udesen, adding, “I would never fib and say that collaboration is easy. Don’t underestimate how much time, intention, and goodwill collaboration requires—but once you figure it out, it’s pretty magical. All three of us are doing incredible programs, but they’re even better because of where we are.”

There have been some setbacks along the way. When Open Book first opened, it featured a 3,000-foot retail space operated by Ruminator Books—a bookstore, across the river in St. Paul, that was a beloved institution. Sales at the Open Book space were disappointing, though, and the cost of that failed venture sped the demise of not only the Minneapolis store, but Ruminator’s original St. Paul bookstore as well. Last year, Milkweed decided the time was right to open a bookstore in the Open Book space again—albeit on a smaller scale this time. Sales over the winter were slow, says Slager, but they’re starting to pick up.

Open Book is a case study in the power of space: The inviting facility is a gathering place and an inspiration for the literary community. It’s also a testament to the benefits of collaboration, and to the wisdom of investing in real estate when it remains affordable.

“The establishment of the building contributed significantly to the longevity and the vitality of three great nonprofit organizations,” says Slager. “It’s become a gathering spot and a true community center.”

“This building feels like it is a proper home for literature,” says Udesen. “It’s not fancy, but it is beautiful. It is exciting to be in, and it feels like the kind of place that storytelling deserves.”

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I assumed he was preparing food for the family to eat later in the day. Instead, he told me the sandwiches were going to nearby apartments of elder adults who had very limited access to food. He said this would likely be their meal for the day.

I asked if I could visit the seniors he was helping, maybe bring a casserole or some flowers to cheer up their day. And so the following Monday morning, my friend Marie and I brought little tuna casseroles and cupcakes, and joined the clergyman on visits to three apartments within three miles of my house.

Each stop went from bad to worse. The first apartment, a block from the Rose Parade route, was home to a lovely woman whose hands were crippled by arthritis and whose back was curled over. She could only push buttons on her microwave and use pop-top cans. The second apartment wasn’t much better. The third apartment stank of stagnant air and animal feces. A very thin woman with extremely swollen ankles the size of baseball bats and large eyeglasses sat on a bare daybed mattress with no sheets or blankets. Her closet door was open, and only one dress was hanging in it. She offered us water–apologizing for having nothing else to share–and said that the glasses were in the cupboard. We found just one glass and nothing else but cans of cat food. Her fridge was empty.

We chatted about the weather and the TV show she’d been watching, but my head was spinning, and I couldn’t focus. It felt like hours had passed, but it was only minutes. I’d walked by this building a hundred times, coffee and cell phone in hand–often on my way to or from a meal.

As I stood with my hand on the door, I felt I had to make a decision right then and there. Do I do nothing and let this be someone else’s problem, and feel pain and intense guilt when this woman dies from neglect? Or do I get involved?

An hour later I dashed into Trader Joe’s in South Pasadena and shared my shock at what I’d just seen and experienced. A wonderful man named Joe–not the Trader Joe–told me to come back on Wednesday. He would help me get some easy-to-open items that the people I’d just visited could eat.

Joe was as good as his word. He helped fold down the seats of my Prius and loaded dolly after dolly of fruits and boxed vegetables. He explained that this food was excess, and the store donated it to make room for newer shipments. (I would learn later that other grocery stores–but not all–do this and more) There was so much food that I could only make left turns; I couldn’t see out the other window.

I soon learned more about the 49 million Americans–one in six of us–who are unsure of where their next meal will come from. I also learned that grocery stores and many food-derived businesses discard their excess unexpired food daily instead of donating it: Up to 40 percent of the food produced in the U.S. is wasted. My big question was: Where did this discarded food go, and how could we get it to struggling people like those I had met in my neighborhood?

For the next two and a half years, I made weekly pick-ups at Trader Joe’s and delivered food to organizations in the Pasadena area, including the AIDS Service Center, the Union Station Homeless Services, and Holy Family Church’s Giving Bank. Meanwhile, I learned everything I could about food waste.

In spring 2010, I attended a convention in San Diego on organics recycling and sustainability to gain an overview of the waste industry. I wanted to be able to have a respectable conversation if a food supplier chose to not donate edible food. For three days, I was a human sponge, absorbing information about sustainability, composting, and renewable energy. The waste industry didn’t particularly care about feeding people, but I gained an enormous amount of respect for its passion and commitment to efficiency and reducing waste. The people I spoke with cared as much about preserving the same pristine organic food I was interested in, just for different reasons.

When I got home I reached out to local agencies in need of food: homeless shelters, churches, food banks from Long Beach to the Westside, senior centers, children’s homes. I asked them how often they needed donations, and whether they required food to be prepared and pre-packaged or if it could be kitchen-made. Then I approached the health department about food safety regulations. Through these meetings I realized that it wasn’t as simple as taking food that one place didn’t need and delivering it to where it was needed. Donating food, I discovered, had a unique set of rules that were outdated and hadn’t been adapted for today’s state-of-the-art methods of heating and cooling food.

I realized the process could be made much more user-friendly so that more cities and companies would want to participate.

In 2012 I founded Urban Harvester, a Los Angeles-based 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. Our focus is getting untapped food resources to the nearest shelter, soup kitchen, and pantry. We designed a scalable model that includes education and outreach to bring communities and businesses together.

We don’t have a fleet of trucks or a facility; our goal is simply to connect the dots. We are like a dating service bringing together food and the agencies that need it. Today we are partnering with 211 LA County—a countywide network that includes 49,000 city, county, public assistant, and nonprofit programs–to try to connect to more agencies for our food work. 211 LA County is part of a larger national network of programs that serve 93 percent of the country. Today, this connection work is done personally and locally, but we have built a database and are using technology to build up a system to connect food and agencies that need food at any hour and across the world.

All types of food suppliers are now involved–not just grocery stores but restaurants, food trucks, Starbucks, the South Pasadena Unified School District, a music festival, a temple, a farmers market, and many wonderful food retailers that prefer to donate food quietly. Just a few weeks ago, we proposed and won unanimous passage from the South Pasadena city council of our first resolution: Businesses, instead of disposing of edible extra food that is professionally prepared, are encouraged to connect the food to local agencies. Our goal is to keep taking big steps, albeit one at a time, to help people with their basic needs.

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