Excellent guide and overview of the process of mutual aid including exactly how to get consensus decisions to work.

An absolute must-read! After I read the galley, I went to the Verso website and bought five copies for myself and my friends with whom I am forming a collective.

Dean Spade aptly describes the difference between mutual aid and charity, and offers wonderful worksheets to develop your own mutual aid organizations. It is absolutely necessary for anyone who is involved in activism and organizing, but would also be helpful to anyone looking for an accessible book on social justice and community building.

This book shows that another world is not only possible - it is in our hands.

A timely and relevant read for anybody interested in mutual aid. Straightforward language helps this book be a really fantastic primer. Already stocked it at my store and it's selling well.

In this current time of pandemic, wildfires, and climate change; while more of white America is waking up to the destructive effects and evils of structural racism and xenophobia, this book charts a new way of living in mutually supportive relationship with our neighbors. Spade addresses the big questions about mutual aid-- what is it, why does it make sense, how is it different from charity-- and gets into the nitty gritty of how a mutual aid group can handle interpersonal conflict, whether and how they should fundraise, and how can they resolve problems through consensus instead of hierarchical models.

The work of real, lasting social change is messy because it involves everyone, with all our individual gifts and foibles and faults. Dean Spade has written a guide for those who are considering stepping into the messy, transformative process, and for those who are already doing the work and wanting extra support.

Mutual Aid is a great primer on what mutual aid is, and how we can use it to achieve solidarity and justice in our communities. With the COVID-19 pandemic on everyone’s minds, mutual aid has come to the forefront of conversations, people coming together to help each other out through evictions, job losses, and more. While mutual aid has existed far longer than March, it is an especially poignant topic to discuss in the age where people are losing further hope in the government and understanding what community really looks like in the face of a pandemic.

Mutual Aid is not only a great primer on what mutual aid is and how it has historically developed in the United States, it also offers suggestions for mutual aid organizations to better organize themselves, avoid burnout, solve inner-group conflict, and more. There are discussion questions for individuals and groups to brainstorm how they react to tough situations and how to better take care of yourself in the face of capitalism to continue to help others.

The book is a quick 150 or so pages and easy to get through, with a wealth of resources in the back if you’re interested in learning more. I am especially impressed that Spade wrote this in such a short period of time, focusing in on the COVID-19 pandemic and resurgence of BLM protests—I can only assume he wrote the bulk of this in the past 6 months, which is beyond impressive. I can barely write my reviews to be long enough to be of any substance and Spade is out here writing a whole book. My hat off to you!

If you don’t read books published by Verso, now should be the time to start. They really pick the best of the best to publish and their books always leave you feeling energized and ready to revolutionize our world.

I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

A great primer of the idea of mutual aid. It's clear, concise and offers a new world for the uninitiated. As someone who has been involved in mutual aid projects for almost 25 years, I was pleased to read Dean Spade's introduction to these concepts.

Really thought-provoking and it did a fantastic job of introducing and explaining the concept of mutual aid. But I walked away with big questions. That probably wasn't the biggest issue for me. The latter half of the book focused pretty heavily on best practices for mutual aid groups and so that's probably who the book is best suited for. Though you could argue that because we should all be engaging in mutual aid, then this book is for all.