Mutual Aid

Mutual Aid is a radical handbook for anyone who grasps the severity of the global poly-crisis and wants a community-based means to fight back. Dean Spade — lawyer, academic, writer, and activist — highlights the bold and innovative ways ordinary people have developed to share resources and care for those in crisis. Mutual aid isn’t charity. It is a form of organizing integral to all influential and successful social movements. Spade offers practical tools and advice to help with the challenges of working in groups, forming a decision-making process, and preventing and addressing conflict.

Dean Spade is an Associate Professor at Seattle University School of Law, where he teaches courses on policing, imprisonment, gender, race, and social movements. Dean has spent over two decades working in social movements working to end prisons, borders, poverty, and war and support people trying to survive right now. In 2002, Dean founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a non-profit law collective that provides free legal services to transgender, intersex and gender non-conforming people who are low-income and/or people of color, and which operates on a collective governance model. Alongside his book Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of the Law, Dean’s writing has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Out, In These Times, Social Text, and Signs.