Crisis of Care
Solidarity Not Charity: Mutual Aid in the Mainstream?
Written by Erica Waltemade
Crisis of Care was an insightful conversation exploring the concept of mutual aid: its role throughout history and its recent entrance into the mainstream as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has devastated so many communities around the world. The crux of the conversation was how those very same communities in crisis, and people all over the world — have looked to one another for lifesaving support through sharing resources, crowdfunding, delivering food, and countless other ways.
The discussion was centered around Çiğdem Slankard’s film, Dreamhood, featured at this year’s SF Urban Film Fest (SFUFF), which follows a diverse group of longtime residents, newcomers, and public and private stakeholders of The International Village Project in Cleveland, Ohio. The project is an ambitious initiative that aims to transform two neighborhoods still struggling from the aftermath of the foreclosure crisis by revitalizing and repopulating them with immigrant and refugee families living in Cleveland.
Moderated by Ronald Sundstrom, Philosophy professor at the University of San Francisco and SFUFF’s Humanities Advisor, the panelists included filmmaker Çiğdem Slankard, local activist and politician Gloria Berry, and the Shanti Project’s Volunteer & Community Support Services Director Mark Molnar. When asked to define mutual aid, four main facts emerged:
- Within mutual aid situations, the community who is in need decides what it needs and how those needs should be met.
- Mutual aid is not a charity. It is bidirectional — and everyone grows in the process. The community has agency in the situation; they are not at the whims or mercy of the donor or funder.
- Mutual aid is common sense, a natural and ancient way of existing with an understanding of our interdependencies.
- Mutual aid is there in times of crisis, government failure, and as an emergency response, but should not be the perpetual state of things.
On the experience of making Dreamhood:
For the filmmaker/producer, Çiğdem Slankard, the genesis of the project came out from her experience of living in Cleveland for the last 12 years, hearing about the International Village Project in the newspaper. In her practice, she has always been interested in issues about space and place, the idea about how we define home — when does a place become home?
“I have a personal connection to that story because I am an immigrant here, who had to find my home in Ohio. I also grew up with stories of displacement, being the daughter of a refugee family… I have always been interested in exploring ideas of belonging and defining what home means, as well as a strong interest in housing as a human right and what that means for our cities and communities.”
On the experience of making the film with the community
Slankard: “It was an amazing experience to make the film. The most striking about the film was the mutual aid/community aspect in the process of making the film. Bringing diverse voices and weaving their stories together. I had some concerns at the beginning of the process…that maybe it would have been a stronger film with a central narrative or character and followed their story from beginning to end…That’s just not the film that we made. It was everybody’s story coming together and I am happy with the result.”
On the role of public and private partnerships in mutual aid:
Molnar: “Ideally communities can support themselves — the classic libertarian idea. But many communities face challenges that they themselves did not create — they should not be solely responsible for fixing these problems. I think it is a responsibility of public and private partnerships to be a part of mutual aid, but with that responsibility comes a lot of challenges and competing interests and goals that shift. For something to be sustainable, the partners need to put the community in the center. All three parties have to be involved — public, private, and the community.
On why we have to start mutual aid:
Molnar: “Mutual aid usually starts because of an emergency situation, where something terrible is happening to a group of people. We saw this with the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. This community was not supported by the government. People came together that needed to help one another. We see it all the time.”
Berry: “This is a difficult question. In my mind it should be innate…How do you get people to have a heart? I really don’t know. Here in San Francisco, we have so many billionaires — how can we get these people to care when they leave a fancy store and step over a human on the sidewalk? I don’t know how to get people to care about the unequal distribution of wealth. I don’t know how you get people to care about mutual aid. We need to point out the ethical and moral imperatives — teaching this lesson through all the modalities that we can.”
Slankard: “We should not have to rely on mercy for people’s basic human needs. Mutual aid should not have to be everything — it should stop a gap, add extra — we shouldn’t rely on it for survival. We have individual responsibilities to act but we have a collective responsibility.”
This discussion drove home how, fundamentally, mutual aid is about restoring morals in our civic lives — how we treat one another. A memorable anecdote told by Berry illustrates how each of us has a role to play in mutual aid. During the City’s first Shelter in Place order that happened at the beginning of the pandemic, she and her fellow community members helped set up an encampment for their unhoused neighbors in the Bayview who had nowhere to go as shelters were closing. The City shut down the site multiple times, and finally, the community involved took to social media — to the public — to get the City to do the right thing. Now, there are five sanctioned outdoor Safe Sleep Sights in San Francisco as a part of the City’s official response to the crisis.
Watch the panel discussion:
This event took place on February 20, 2021 and was curated by SF Urban Film Fest Festival Manager Kristal Çelik. For more information about the SF Urban Film Fest, visit our website.
