From free groceries to mental healthcare, mutual aid means building community—and political power

It became a buzzword in 2020, but “mutual aid” isn’t charity—it’s about creating a culture of collectivity. Here’s how some Atlanta organizations are putting that philosophy into action.

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Marlon Kautz, a Food4Life volunteer, carries a “Food Not Bombs” sign back from a Sunday food distribution near his Edgewood home. Neighbors help with setting up and breaking down—and take food home.

This story is part of an ongoing series about Atlantans helping Atlantans.

On a recent Wednesday afternoon, a handful of Atlantans sat in hot cars in a parking lot in Gresham Park, waiting to collect groceries from a local food-distribution organization. When the first round of volunteers showed up, they had boxes of food but no folding tables to distribute it on—which didn’t seem to bother anybody. The volunteers neatly lined the boxes up on the ground. Neighbors selected produce, like Japanese sweet potatoes, and prepared food from the Little Five Points health food co-op Sevananda to stick into their grocery bags. 

Two women, one of them a Food4Life volunteer, pick out food to take home during the Wednesday distro, which occurs in the majority-Black neighborhood of Gresham Park.

People take food home during a Wednesday distro in Gresham Park.

The operation is organized by Food4Life, which arose out of the Atlanta chapter of Food Not Bombs, an international organization that espouses a “solidarity not charity” model for giving away food. Several times a week, Food4Life’s network of volunteers fans out across Atlanta to places like grocery stores and farmers’ markets, picking up food that would otherwise be thrown away due to approaching expiration dates or cosmetic damage. They take the food to a large cooler housed at a church, where another group picks it up and redistributes it at “food distros” like the one in Gresham Park. Many people have come to rely on events like this; one elderly woman says she depends on it to help feed her six grandchildren. Sometimes the food is gone within 30 minutes.

Victoria and James, Food4Life volunteers, carry boxes picked up from a local grocery chain to their cars during the weekly Tuesday run.

Victoria, a Food4Life volunteer, sorts and organizes groceries in order to store them in a cooler at a nearby church. Another group of volunteers then delivers to "food distros" around Atlanta. Many volunteers also take food home from the distros.

On the surface, Food4Life is just giving out groceries. But it’s also subverting the traditional, top-down model of charity because its volunteers receive food too—they’re in need just like the people they’re helping. Sarah, a volunteer who picks up from a local grocery store and who prefers to share only her first name, estimates that she saves $80 to $100 a week on groceries. The Food4Life model “feels different,” she says, because of the lack of hoops people need to jump through, and because of its culture of “taking what you need and never telling each other to not take too much.”

A box of groceries that one of the Food4Life volunteers is taking home. One volunteer says the group’s model “feels different” because of the lack of hoops people need to jump through.

These practices challenge artificial scarcity: the idea that there isn’t enough to go around. In reality, there’s plenty, Sarah asserts—it’s just unevenly distributed. She also credits the food distro with creating a culture of sharing within her own home: “My friends know they can come over and eat whatever they need, and that feels really good.” While she acknowledges that the food distro network in Atlanta only chips away at the systemic failures that leave people hungry or with nutritionally poor diets—and that it may not be around forever—she’s hopeful about the culture of sharing that’s being created, which could last even if the network disappears. Sarah says Food4Life has enabled her to not be a “worker-robot”—and to be generous. “We’re living high off the hog,” she says. “And it’s all just diverted food waste.”

“My friends know they can come over and eat whatever they need, and that feels really good.” —Sarah, Food4Life volunteer

In 2020, in the wake of a global pandemic and protests fueled by the racist police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, mutual aid projects exploded across the world, including meal deliveries, sewing squads, childcare collectives, and legal aid. But we’ve also seen “mutual aid” become watered down and co-opted by governments and nonprofits that, while sometimes providing useful services and resources, do nothing to challenge the conditions that create hunger and poverty. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, for instance, the Black Panther Party launched a free breakfast program to feed thousands of children in Black communities across the U.S.; it also provided medical services and education based on a “liberation curriculum.” The FBI, recognizing its effectiveness, deemed the breakfast program the “greatest threat” to ongoing state efforts to neutralize the Black nationalist organization and moved to destroy it. A subsequent government-sponsored free breakfast program, administered by the USDA, represented more of a charity model, stripped of political education and liberatory potential. 

Through shared struggle, people feel empowered to improve and ultimately liberate themselves from oppressive conditions, writes Dean Spade in his seminal 2020 book, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next). Spade describes mutual aid as coming together not only to meet each other’s needs—both in times of crisis and outside of them—but also to build political analysis and awareness. Many mutual aid models today rely more on the first notion and less the second.

In Atlanta, projects like Food4Life are challenging ideas associated with traditional charity. Park Avenue Baptist Church, a queer-friendly faith community, provides everything from liberation sermons to housing to free stores and communal meals. This church serves as an example of people coming together under shared values in search of community and resources, thereby escaping the shame, isolation, and stigma that comes from seeing their conditions as “individual moral failings instead of systemic failures,” as Spade writes.

A sign for Park Avenue Baptist Church’s food pantry, which began in 2020, sits outside the building’s side entrance. “It was made in 2020 near a living memorial to people killed in police violence,” Rev. Darci Jaret says. “And it was one of the most important works during the lockdown part of the pandemic, when the church was not meeting on Sundays.”

Rev. Darci Jaret—who goes by Rev. Darci—sits in a room set aside for meditation at Park Avenue Baptist Church. The church serves as an example of people coming together under shared values in search of community and resources.

The church is home to about five residents at a time. Some are mothers, some young adults; one serves as a pastor. CJ Ortiz, a long-term resident who helps manage the building, talked to me about his experience in prison and ending up on the streets and how he eventually came to live and work at Park Ave. He sees the work as a calling from God, as something that helps him spiritually and mentally. He serves as a mentor for many who come through the church, including a young kid who has been struggling with his mental health. “Helping him has helped me,” Ortiz says. “Helping him is helping myself.”

“Helping him has helped me.” —CJ Ortiz, Park Avenue Baptist Church building manager

Rev. Darci Jaret and CJ Ortiz—the building manager and a resident of Park Avenue Baptist Church—look through church supplies, gathering toiletries for someone just getting out of a hospital.

Rev. Darci sits in the meditation room and knits a baby blanket, which they often make as gifts.

Ortiz shows a new room being outfitted with four beds for trans women in need. He’s looking forward to decorating the room and adding curtains.

A nonprofit called Metro Atlanta Mutual Aid Fund, or Mama Fund, arose out of the explosion of mutual aid efforts in 2020, redistributing $800,000 in donations over the next few years. While this fund was essentially charity, it’s now transitioning to projects that are more mutual in their design, such as neighborhood “time banks,” which are basically time trades for labor: “You can put an hour into the timebank mowing someone's lawn and then another, completely different person who is part of the timebank spends an hour fixing your car,” says Sanae Alaoui, a Mama Fund organizer. The idea is to create a culture of meeting each other’s needs without money; instead, the “currency” is an hour for an hour. “If the work you’re doing is only helping other people and not yourself, then it’s not mutual aid,” Alaoui explains.

“You can put an hour into the timebank mowing someone’s lawn and then another, completely different person who is part of the timebank spends an hour fixing your car.” —Sanae Alaoui, Mama Fund organizer

Many projects focus on meeting immediate material needs. But people also increasingly struggle with the high costs of mental and physical healthcare. Care Wave is a collective of care workers that arose in 2020, when Mara, then a bartender, saw a need in her downtown Atlanta neighborhood. With many service organizations closed due to the pandemic, the unhoused community had little support, Mara observed: “I saw mental healthcare crisis after mental healthcare crisis.” 

Mara is one of the founders of Care Wave, a collective that organizes care clinics, providing everything from massages to peer support.

She began to ask herself: “What can we do to train everyone in this neighborhood to deal with mental health crises without calling the cops?” Mara, who has training in peer support, created a guide to mental healthcare for people working in the service industry nearby. They would go to different businesses and conduct de-escalation trainings and teach somatic practices. The goal was to empower people to know what to do if they witnessed a mental health crisis. 

Butch, one of the founders of Care Wave, stands in a room used for massages and other free services, including conflict resolution, community care, and solidarity workshops—all offered by members of the community, to members of the community.

Eventually, Mara’s network grew. In 2021, she was introduced to the movement to stop Cop City, the widely opposed $110 million police training center currently under construction in a forest in DeKalb County. For more than a year, as part of the movement, people autonomously occupied the forest and organized events in neighboring Weelaunee Park, where Mara and her network of care workers saw a need and a possibility. As a space open to everyone, the forest was perfect for experimenting with anticarceral forms of care, Mara thought—so Care Wave hosted conflict resolution, community care, and solidarity workshops. During weeks of action, people were called to come to Weelaunee Forest to hold rallies and screen films; Care Wave was able to provide “a landing pad” for people during and after actions with their “care days,” which consisted of food, massages, therapy sessions, acupuncture, and more.

Mara believes outsourcing mental health problems to institutions often causes more harm and that, instead, we can build the skills to take care of each other. Speaking about the care days, she says, “It was kind of small and rinky-dink, but it was incredible how many people have since stepped into a peer-support role because they feel empowered to do so. I think we’re born with a lot of care skills as human beings. We’re just indoctrinated by a hyperindividualistic culture.” •