Gabriel Solomon: Hello, and welcome to Narrating Utah, a podcast hosted by Westminster College’s, gender studies program, and sociology department. I'm your host, Gabriel Solomon and my co-host is Quinn Winter. In this episode, Quinn and I decided to look into a small mutual aid network near Westminster College called COVID-19 Mutual Aid, SLC, or SLCMA as members call it. We will be talking with three of its members, Isaac, Cameron, and Juls. Created as COVID-19 first made its way into Utah, this network of people organized grocery deliveries when store shelves were being swept by panic buyers. Since then SLCMA has incorporated programs beyond their original project of assisting fellow community members through the initial stages of the pandemic. Such as protestor support during the black lives matter uprisings of the summer of 2020 to a community garden and FREEdges or free fridges that will be run by neighborhoods facing food insecurity.
Quinn Winter: But what is mutual aid and how is it any different from charity? The term has been popping up more often over the past year and a half as more communities have relied on one another during the pandemic. The goals of mutual aid are to serve as an alternative to charity and create networks of care without relying on institutional aid. It's about community members supporting each other through hardships, giving and getting in turn where there is no outsider or savior making quick fixes. Mutual aid centers leftist politics that are opposed to the systemic issues that caused the need for support in the first place.We sat down with three members of SLCMA over Zoom, to understand the role SLCMA has in the community and understand the value of mutual aid better.
Isaac: Uh, mutual aid is something that is one, always going to work better because nobody has the solutions to issues in the community, other than that community.
Gabriel Solomon: We asked one of the people who helped organize SLCMA from the beginning, Isaac, why he initially became involved with mutual aid. Utah's known for various charity work primarily through religious institutions, so we wanted to understand what separated charity from mutual aid for organizers like Isaac.
Isaac: I've previously worked in like, uh, volunteer coordinating, and one fun thing that everybody says is that Utah's number one in the country for volunteer hours and stuff, but I'd say I follow that with probably number 50 with volunteer outcomes.  So I, that's not official, but,
Gabriel Solomon: While charity operations are abundant in the salt lake valley. They tend to be focused on the betterment of the volunteers for giving their time or resources and less concerned about the long term outcomes for the communities that they serve. Instead, mutual aid works to focus on sustainable support systems that improve the wellbeing of all community members.
Juls: I think a lot of us, especially people from marginalized communities have been involved in mutual aid in ways that we did not even like some of us didn't even realize didn't even call it mutual aid. It's like the active, like reciprocal support, um, between, uh, community members.That means like willingness to give, which I think, you know, the charity model sometimes gets right but what the charity model never gets right is like receiving and being in community with, in a peer sense, as opposed to the idea that we just give and everyone else's needy, you know
Gabriel Solomon: Juls has been working with SLCMA for over a year now. Cameron, who's been part of SLCMA since August, 2020 defines mutual aid by people's willingness to help one another without strict terms and conditions.
Cameron: At its core, it's really the idea that like, people in the community or even people in general will help each other out without any sort of terms without any sort of conditions. It's just, you're going to help people out because that's what we do. I mean, if someone asks you directly for help, There's a good chance even if you don't know the person you're going to try and help, maybe you can't help the way they specifically need, but you're at least going to want to try. And so that's really different from charity, which is built on this idea of like people who are better off, like, coming to an area and saying they have a solution or they have a fix. Charity has a lot of conditions with it. So for instance, it requires something called means testing, Where you have to like verify a person's income. Do they really need help? Do they really deserve help?Um, or another one would be like, let's say someone is, uh, using illegal substances. Um, a lot of charity would say, okay, you don't deserve help because you've made a bad decision. You're a bad person and mutual aid it doesn't like that. Uh, for mutual aid, it's kind of like, oh, you're doing these substances. Well, why is there something wrong with society that's pushing you to that? For instance, a lot of people who are unsheltered, uh, will use things because life just kind of sucks if you don't have a safe place to sleep at night, if you're always on edge. So of course it makes sense you would do things like that. And as a result, like life just gets harder. And mutual aid, the perspective from that is like, okay, so you need help. Let's see what we can do. It doesn't really care about whether or not the person made good or bad decisions. It's about like, is society giving them the support they need. Do they have the community supporting them? Do they have the resources they need? And these are things that are very different from charity.
Quinn Winter: Do they really need and deserve help? That question is central to the charity model of support. Take, for example, the Bishop’s storehouse run by the LDS church. People who are facing food insecurity can get access to resources in the storehouse by talking to a Bishop or their Relief Society President, another philanthropic organization run by the LDS church.For someone to get food from a Bishop’s storehouse, they have to be approved by the Bishop, then the Bishop and the relief society president decide what and how much the person in need receives. Whereas mutual aid gives people trust and agency to know their own needs and situations. Another key difference is what is expected from the people who receive aid. After getting food through the LDS church, people are asked to work or support the church in some way in exchange for what they've been given. Many people are also told to attend church for a period of time before or after getting support mutual aid is structured. So these pressures aren't there.
Juls: An inspiring force for me is when people look at something that has been like given to them and they go like, "this is free?"
Quinn Winter: Food from a charity may not cost money, but it frequently costs time and energy for the person receiving aid. Many of the food insecurity programs in the valley require a lot of paperwork, which can be an intimidating barrier. In addition, many service projects or other forms of humanitarian aid are partially framed by how the people giving are good people helping the needy. Mutual aid says that all people need support and all people should give the support they are able to.
Isaac: And like, you know, normally with volunteer projects, like we take a picture at the end or like, uh, there's like a highlight reel or something like that. But then I thought about it. And, you know, it's not in, it's not really about me or the good feeling that I get from volunteering It was never kind of like about that. Um, it's not about. Like, uh, me being a good person, it's the end of me as like an individual and the beginning of me as like a part of this like community stuff and that, you know, if I'm choosing solidarity, that's where I'm at. It is like explicitly political, uh, all mutual aid it is, has to be explicitly political. If not, it's just charity. Um, and that is like the core of it all. Cause all these issues like poverty, you know, uh, racism, I mean all, you know, each is an explicitly political issue.
Quinn Winter: All three members of SLCMA we interviewed talked about how the focus is on support and how impactful that is. There's no difference between people who need help and people who give help and mutual aid because everyone is working in community with one another.
Gabriel Solomon: So in March, 2020, right before the salt lake lockdown started, a group of organizers saw the impact that the pandemic was already having  and decided to do something about it.
Isaac: Think it was like mid March 15 or 17 for something. Um, my roommate, he told me about it. Um, there was this group of organizers that was like getting put together like overnight. And, uh, it was using this, the model that was kind of spreading across the nation and like, uh, like wildfire pretty much that came out of Seattle of, uh, just grocery and, you know, and direct aid, mutual aid projects and stuff.
My involvement started like that weekend where Um, uh, one, a local organization organized. It was like, Hey, I found this cool thing. We should do it too for salt lake. Okay. Sounds good. We need somebody for this feeling. We got, you know, one friend, uh, need somebody for this. It was really amazing to see.
Quinn Winter: To start, SLCMA was a group of six to seven people working 80 hour weeks before they gained more traction in members, when it became self-sustaining.
Juls: The beginning had a lot of support from, uh, liberals. That was like a huge base of support, which you know, I think that it has been pretty powerful as it's moved forward, because as we've become more radical, more explicitly political as an organization, I think it's been like a nice gateway for folks actually. Um, but when it comes to support, there were a lot of, I think, liberal people who understood they had wealth that was not necessarily they had earned, right. That was like generational or like due to other forms of privilege. And they were interested in redistributing it. That was the initial response, which I think is something that I'm like still very interested in and like analyzing,
Gabriel Solomon: SLCMA became clearer about their leftist politics and they lost some funding from liberals, leaving their support base. At the same time, more people were drawn to their clearly stated politics.
Juls: Basically just like, if you live next to someone, you should like know them, you should like be able to like stick up for them. Hopefully they would stick up for you.
Gabriel Solomon: SLCMA  became involved with more organizers over the summer while giving their support during the Black Lives Matter uprising that happened in response to the murder of George Floyd. Cameron mentioned how this protest support was one of the first ways they got involved with SLCMA.
Cameron: So Salt Lake Mutual Aid helps, does what it calls, protest support, which is basically like bringing water snacks, some safety stuff at protests, trying to reduce the risk of anyone getting hurt, that sort of stuff. And with that, I'd helped out one time and a couple people invited me to. Just kind of hang out afterwards. And what really stood out was just how welcoming people were. So, because none of these people I had met in person and here I am in one of their backyards this bonfire going and, you know, didn't feel like I was an outsider. Didn't feel like I was new to the group. I felt like I was welcomed. And I, that was a really cool experience. And it kinda in my head like made me mentally commit to like being a part of the group.
Quinn Winter: Projects are branch in different directions as the needs of vulnerable groups in the valley, continually shifted. SLCMA continued to decentralize their operations and got rid of formal leadership.
Cameron: Another project we do is we work in a coalition called the open air shelter and a big focus of that is providing food and resources to, unsheltered people. And one of the things that always sticks out to me is it's pretty common for someone to say thank you for treating me like a human and the first time I heard that, like I was on the verge of tears. Cause these people go through a ton and they're just not used to people caring about them. But then the other thing is, once they know someone cares about them, they start well, once someone knows people care about them, they start to be much more empowered. They're a lot more confident they're able to get the things they need and then they start helping other people because they know the impact that has, and it just starts to feed on itself.
Gabriel Solomon: Because SLCMA began due to increased needs caused by the pandemic. The original branding was COVID-19 mutual aid Salt Lake City. We asked what the future would look like for the organization and whether they foresaw it continuing.
Juls: We had like a enormous all teams meeting a few months ago where we made a lot of big changes, but one of the central questions to that was like, do you want to continue? Um, since we were really born out of COVID-19, um, And we were just like really wanting to make sure that people were like still interested in continuing this collective, obviously mutual aid as a concept would continue, but would SLCMA continue. Um, and I was actually like really surprised and really like excited to see that almost unanimously people did want to continue and like, didn't want to lose the connections they had made.
Isaac: Well, you know, we're going to have to change all of ours ocial media handles, which is really annoying because it's on our garden boxes. But, at this time, uh, there, I don't think there is a single project that we do that is COVID specific. Um, and it hasn't been kind of like that for a while.  The idea of like our collective is that like, when somebody enters it, they have just as much like decision-making power kind of like as anybody else in the collective, we have no hierarchy.
Quinn Winter: One thing that was emphasized is the goal to become more local connected and sustainable.
Isaac: It is going to be an ever-changing kind of, uh, organization and ever-changing projects, you know, similarly, so whatever, like the community collective wants or needs.
Juls: You don't have to join SLCMA to do mutual aid  but if you do want to join SLCMA, you know, it's, it's super easy to get involved. Like I said, a one hour training. Um, I think another thing I would say is definitely if you can, uh, try and talk to your neighbors, um, like I know that I still a little work to do in that regard as well. For me, like mutual aid is something that has very much like helped me, um, honestly like stay alive throughout, growing up, and then also like stay connected to my community. Um, and I think that's apparent in like things as simple as like I'm from Texas and when there was that like enormous freeze, you know, I was, I was in Utah, but people like from home were messaging me and like asking if my Nana like needed any groceries, then like offering to do things for her, right.  So stuff like that, it's like very clear community care that I come from. So coming to salt lake, the reason why I wanted to be involved in mutual aid is just, it feels very much like home. And it's a great way to like, get to know the people who are hopefully going to be there for you when shit goes down.
Cameron: There's been a lot of conversations in our group, like one-on-one or in small groups about like, how difficult things are, um, particular for instance. So I'm a student at the university of Utah studying environmental studies and with that, like, I don't think people understand the scale to which like climate change is an actual problem. It's very easy to say, oh, it's a problem. But the actual impact, how that's going to affect people, uh there's the more you look into it, kind of the, more of a dare I say, nightmare it is. The thing is, is the more. I'm involved with the group. The more hopeful I am. Surprisingly one of the best ways I've found to like, cope with existential anxiety is by doing stuff with Salt Lake Mutual Aid, because it helps me see that you can build stuff that you can change things. I think hope is more important than people realize. And I don't think it comes from reading a book, watching a video, watching a movie. I think that stuff can help, but I think one of the best ways is to actually get involved with others who share your values and work towards something. Because the minute you do that, you start to see that. Well first you see it's even harder than you would realize, but the other thing you realize is like, that doesn't necessarily matter. It doesn't matter how hard something is. It just matters whether it's worth doing. I don't think we've ever had a conversation in the group that's oh, this is hard. Is it worth doing? No, it's always, this is something that needs to be done. So how do we do it?
Gabriel Solomon: In the world we live in one that's threatened by climate change, fueled by over-consumption and capitalist greed. It can be easiest to shut down to disengage from the communities around you, but networks like SLCMA have become a way for many people to find hope.
Gabriel Solomon: This episode was produced by the gender studies program and the sociology department at Westminster college recorded and edited. By Quinn, Winter and Gabriel Solomon sound designed by Jared Winn Taylor music by Lukrembro, and our logo was created by Catherine Nelson. Special thanks to Eileen Chanza Torres, Krisjane Nordmeyer, Isaac, Juls, and Cameron.