Mutual Aid
This blog first appeared on 12th September 2025 for KARAMA
https://karama.org.uk/blogs/f/faith-mutuality-and-the-reimagining-of-humanitarian-aid
Mutual aid in the humanitarian sector is a term that describes the collaborative, community-driven exchange of resources, skills, and support among individuals, groups, or communities affected by crises—without relying primarily on formal institutions, governments, or external aid organisations. It emphasises reciprocity, solidarity, and local agency rather than hierarchical or top-down assistance. That sounds to me like a good anti-colonial modification to the international development project that was founded around the free market economy and used to further the foreign policies of the largest nation states economies.
As a humanitarian practitioner and academic researcher who is white, temporarily able bodied, cis-heterosexual, Christian and English speaking, I am highly privileged. I was born into and educated in bastions of colonial inheritance. I have and still do benefit from my white privilege all over the place. As part of my personal and professional commitment decolonising myself and my work I am learning to critique the massive, monolithic structural systems that run the world to my advantage.
In fact, I believe it is an act of non-violence for those of us that benefit from oppressive systems to dismantle them from within, instead of waiting for someone from outside, who has already been crushed by the system, to have to do violence to the system, become a perpetrator, in order to break it down.
So, mutual aid sounds like a re-branding of ancient, pre-existing systems of society that the international development project has diminished in the century of projectisation of all things!
For me, mutuality is the key to so much of my religious understanding of life. In the Christian faith tradition the idea of humanity as a body of mutually interconnected members or limbs is seminal (see 1 Corinthians 12). In the Muslim faith tradition the ummah also underscores the universal human community connected by shared origin, ethics and mutuality (Qur’an 49:13; Sahih Muslim 2586). So I’m all for mutuality in the aid system.
And I cannot help but be certain that religious groups; churches, mosques, temples, synagogues, gurdwaras are key to mutual aid. These faith based groups have been in their communities for millennia. They are the fabric of a place, these religious ‘bodies’ have ways of working that are focused on helping one another, guarding and protecting the most vulnerable and using their inbuilt networks for public good.
