Mutual Aid: Building Communities of Care During Crisis and Beyond #RadicalMay

A Radical Guide has teamed up with PM Press, Haymarket Books, and Verso Books to bring you this #RADICALMAY live event, Mutual Aid: Building Communities of Care During Crisis and Beyond. 

This panel brings longtime mutual aid organizers together to discuss how to protect each other during this time of crisis through fostering cooperation, not competition.

This event is free, and we are asking for solidarity contributions that will be donated to Mutual Aid groups chosen by the panelists.

About Mutual Aid: Building Communities of Care During Crisis and Beyond

As governments and corporations fail to protect ordinary people from the ravages of the crisis, community networks are organizing their own communities around the principles of mutual aid, solidarity, and autonomous direct action. Their aim is solidarity, not charity. Cooperation and interdependence, not competition.

Learn from longtime mutual aid organizers on how to protect each other during coronavirus and how to build long-term, liberatory, and resilient communities beyond this pandemic and the death cult of capitalism and settler colonialism.

The Panelist

Mariame Kaba is an organizer, educator, founder of Project NIA, and author of Missing Daddy.

Dean Spade has spent over two decades 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 collective that provides free legal services to transgender, intersex, and gender non-conforming people who are low-income and/or people of color. He is the author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of the Law, and the director of the documentary, “Pinkwashing Exposed.” In 2017, he started the website BigDoorBrigade.com to help people start and sustain mutual aid projects and to circulate popular education materials about the role of mutual aid in transformative movements.

Klee Benally is a Diné (Navajo) anarchist, direct action tactician with Indigenous Action Media, and co-creator of the Indigenous Mutual Aid network

Kali Akuno is a longtime organizer, co-founder, and co-director of Cooperation Jackson, and co-editor of Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi.

Moderated by Tim Holland, host of Solecast podcast and revolutionary hip hop artist.

Sponsored by PM Press, Haymarket Books, Verso Books, and A Radical Guide.

#RadicalMay to transform the world

The world has been hit by a pandemic that has shaken the foundations of capitalist society. In these uncertain times, it is more important than ever to think and discuss the ideas that will bring about the profound transformations that our societies need.

The world of books — and especially critical-minded publishers — are experiencing a very difficult time internationally, given the closure of bookstores. And in difficult times, we need to unite. For this reason, a series of radical publishers from around the world, together with LITERAL — a radical festival of books and ideas — have organized an online radical book fair, running activities in as many time zones and languages as possible to spread the radical ideas that will change the world.

In this spirit, across the month of May, we will enjoy #RadicalMay — a varied and multilingual program of round tables, talks, and debates around the ideas that will transform the world to come.

We issue a call to all people, movements, organizations, and above all publishers, magazines, and radical publications around the world to join the #RadicalMay initiative to transform reality. In so doing, we can come out of confinement more prepared, better organized, and with more ideas and more radicals.