DDGC Mutual Aid Organizing Principles

by Kiley Kost (Carleton College) 
 
DDGC's Mutual Aid group formed after DDGC's second town hall meeting on the Crisis of Labor and Graduate Education in German Studies in late 2020. Since then, our group has worked together virtually to develop a mutual aid infrastructure that responds to the immediate needs of our colleagues and works toward creating sustainable and equitable working conditions in and around German Studies. Mutual aid is the practice of providing direct support—in any form—to members of a community from members of that same community. As a mutual relationship, community members supply assistance and resources to each other and are empowered to ask for help when needed. DDGC mutual aid group members Emily Frazier-Rath and Maggie Rosenau outline how the precarious labor conditions and lack of structural support in our field make mutual aid a necessity in their impressive and comprehensive blog post on the topic from May 2021.
 
Our mutual aid group has worked together to mindfully develop a non-hierarchical organizational structure that fosters mutual support from within. In this post, I outline our group’s structure and organizing principles to offer a model for other collectives who wish to work together in a meaningful and effective way. We aim to share the very resources that we have developed and consider this itself a gesture of mutual aid. 
 
How can our organization’s structure be useful as a model for other groups?
Our mutual aid working group is currently made up of seven members: Paul Dobryden, Emily Frazier-Rath, Kiley Kost, Ervin Malakaj, ​Nichole Neuman, Maggie Rosenau, and Beverly Weber (Derek Price was an essential group member from the start and recently stepped away). Each member shares equal responsibility and power; there is no chairperson, no treasurer, no secretary. Instead, duties are dispersed equally and equitably among participants. 
 
When our group first formed, our initial discussions concerned the politics and logistics of running a mutual aid group and setting up its infrastructure. In addition to looking at examples of mutual aid groups, we read and discussed Dean Spade’s Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis (and the Next), which was particularly instrumental in thinking through how mutual aid might restructure relations in our network as well as developing our organizational structure in a non-hierarchical manner. We had many conversations about the politics of mutual aid and about how we hoped to relate to each other and our broader community. A guiding question for our conversations was: How might our group’s relational practice generate new structures of community and better relations in our field more broadly?
 
Thoughtful discussions and meaningful reflection created the framework for how we engage in mutual aid, informed the political position from which we act, and provided the groundwork for our cohesive group. We also conducted an initial survey to determine the needs and resources of people affiliated with German Studies. Derek Price outlined the results of the survey with data visualizations in a blog post from June 2021. After establishing our organizing principles, our main task has been to monitor the requests for mutual aid that are submitted through the request form. 
 
Each week two members are responsible for checking the email account and responding to any requests we received through the form. These communication pairs change every week according to a communications schedule shared with the group. During the beginning stages of our mutual aid group, we came up with a clear protocol for responding to requests and created a workflow to keep track of requests, which is updated by the pair in charge of email that week. Because of the collective nature of our group, we can easily adapt if a certain member needs to step away from the group and prioritize other parts of their life. 
 
Since we formed our group in December 2020, we have held monthly virtual meetings. Between these meetings, we share updates, ideas, and related information in our slack channel. For each meeting, we rotate the meeting facilitator, the person who schedules and hosts the meeting, and a notetaker. Our regular meeting schedule has both allowed our group to respond to the needs of our colleagues in/near German Studies and has served as a space for our group to make meaningful connections with each other in an entirely virtual space. 
 
At the start of each meeting, we always make time to check in with the group and share any news. We also grapple with difficult questions about the politics of mutual aid, including the following: 

• What does it take to build a meaningful and impactful infrastructure, especially in a broken system?

• How do we theorize mutual aid to serve our community? What discursive work is necessary around aid, precarity, need, etc.? In other words, how does one ask for help? Who is asking for help? Who are they asking? For what? Who is not asking? Why?

• How does shame play a role in requisition aid? How can we remove this barrier?

• Do we need to be concerned about who asks for money? Should we restrict who can ask for money? How would we prove this? What are the ethics of this? 

• Do we need to verify someone’s identity in order to respond to their request for aid, especially for financial requests? How do we deal with anonymity otherwise? 

• How do we respond to repeat requests? How can we intervene to offer more robust support? 

• What relational structures do we hope to inspire through mutual aid? Can we live up to the demands we make of ourselves and others? 

 
The questions above have come to inform programming in our mutual aid group and the DDGC network in general. As a collective, we have found that one way to support each other is to create strong relationships in the group and come together before acute needs arise. In practice, this emerges in our monthly meetings and additional virtual gathering focused on intentional community building. Beverly Weber, a member of our group who is also a trained facilitator for restorative justice, led us through a group discussion that allowed us to strengthen our group for the sake of community, rather than as a response to an incident or need. The DDGC community get-togethers organized around labor justice serve to build community in a similar manner.
 
We have built our collective intentionally and have prioritized conscious collaboration in our work. If you are interested in joining the Mutual Aid working group, please contact us at ddgc.mutualaid@gmail.com. We are looking for more members to take part in this important work for our community. 
 
 
Works Cited
Frazier-Rath, Emily, and Maggie Rosenau. “Mutual Aid in our German Studies Communities: Why and How to Do Collective Organizing and Care Work in Academia.” DDGC Blog. May 25, 2021. https://diversityingermancurriculum.weebly.com/ddgc-blog/mutual-aid-in-our-german-studies-communities-why-and-how-to-do-collective-organizing-and-care-work-in-academia. Accessed May 11, 2022.
 
Price, Derek. “Reflections on the DDGC Mutual Aid Action Group Survey: What do People Need, and What can We Provide?” DDGC Blog. June 1, 2021, https://diversityingermancurriculum.weebly.com/ddgc-blog/reflections-on-the-ddgc-mutual-aid-action-group-survey-what-do-people-need-and-what-can-we-provide. Accessed May 11, 2022.  
 
Spade, Dean. Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis (and the Next). New York: Verso, 2020.