Two questions to transform the world
Gabrielle Newell encourages us to ask: "What can we give, and what do we want to receive?"
I first met Gabrielle at a Galentine’s Day party that we were both leaving early from to get to a protest. Our friendship has spanned from picking each others’ brains about organizing and narrative change, to adventuring together across countries and continents. Some of my fondest memories are of the D.C. walks we took, where we talked about everything from the role of a social safety net in a democracy to concepts of cooperation, whether in housing or the workplace. Gabrielle is a brilliant organizer and a deep thinker about how we create the systems and the joy that will sustain us. Her wisdom about mutual aid lends us into more fundamental questions about what it means to be needed and to need one another.
-Lia
Q&A: Gabrielle Newell
During a recent conversation, you mentioned to me that you’re creating workshops meant to help people to imagine a future world they want to live in. Why did you decide to do this kind of training?
It's rooted in this principle that I was raised with, Sankofa, that we need to look to the past to inform our future. I've gained a lot of energy and inspiration from looking at D.C. history and learning about moments when people came together to care for each other, and to celebrate and to find joy in circumstances that were still really dark.
And so that's how I started this effort called Swan Society, where we gather to celebrate and uplift untold parts of D.C. history where people came together to practice mutual aid and to find joy. We use that to inspire and think about: “What could we be doing today to care for each other and to build the futures that we all deserve?”
Swan Society is named after William Dorsey Swan, who was born, enslaved, on the eastern shore of Maryland in the 1850’s. By the 1880’s, William Dorsey Swan was hosting drag balls in D.C. This is 15 years after the end of the Civil War. Imagine the courage and the conviction it must have taken to host these gatherings. And these were multiracial gatherings, too. We have a huge amount of detail about these gatherings because they were regularly broken up by the police. To know that this is a choice that William Dorsey Swan and their community made to continue to show up and gather for these joyous occasions, despite the risk. They still felt like it was worth it. It was a courageous celebration.
Stories like these can motivate us.
It's a really effective organizing practice to be able to imagine in vivid detail, with all of our senses, a future that's positive, a future that we want. And then, once we see it and we feel it, and we're convinced that it's worth working towards, we have that as an anchor to direct our energy and keep us motivated.
I think a lot of us are feeling the immediacy of the attacks on our political institutions. Fascism is present, and it's not hiding. In times like these, it’s helpful to look to dark periods from the past and see that people made the choice to come together and be brave and throw a good party. That inspires us to continue, to find joy while creating meaningful change. We often say that the movement must be joyful, and it's because, in order to continue to do the hard work to show up, we need to find ways to care for each other and feel joy while doing it.
How do you embody this in your organizing work?
In most of the spaces that I organize in D.C., we organize in a really relational way. So that means that so much of our lives are interconnected. Not only are we on Zoom Meetings multiple times a week together, but we're also sharing dinners together, celebrating birthdays, and just showing up as consistent and reliable forces in each other's lives.
I incorporate that into organizing practice in D.C., which is also just the life that I've gotten to build for myself.
Tell us more about your organizing practice and the relational, mutual framework it’s grounded in.
Well, many of us would define mutual aid as this universal practice that has always been in existence. It is something very simple. It's neighbors coming together wherever they are to identify what they can build together by pooling their resources and creating something where they all benefit.
And so, during the start of The COVID-19 pandemic in D.C., organizers came together and formed the D.C. Mutual Aid network, which was one iteration of a long-existing practice in D.C. In the Ward One Mutual Aid group, which I helped to start, we consistently incorporated what we called political education. So when we would come together, we would not only talk about what we need to respond to right now, but we would also orient ourselves in what has been done.
Part of the fun with non-hierarchical organizing is that there’s a rotating role of who's bringing the political education in any given week, so people can bring anything that inspires them or that they think other people should know about. What that means is that many of us get to make that judgment call of what's worth talking about.
Anyone is capable of doing this kind of organizing. What I would like to see is that more people feel like they have been practicing how to do it, and so they know how to kick it up wherever they are.
You’re speaking about mutual aid organizing as a practice where people share decision making power and rely on one another to accomplish goals. What have you been able to accomplish through this approach?
In Ward One Mutual Aid, we had a study club focused on the history of cooperatives. As one historian, Jessica Gordon Nembhard, reflected in her study of cooperatives, all successful cooperatives started as a study club because it was a place to build shared understanding and trust. And that goes back to trusting other people's leadership, too. If we're investing in learning together, then we are each helping to equip ourselves to be better informed to make decisions.
We dreamed, one day off in the far distant future, we would buy one of these really expensive apartment buildings in Ward One D.C., an area that's highly gentrifying, to create affordable housing and a community institution that could last forever.
And then, in June 2021, I was on my way to a Juneteenth celebration in Anacostia, D.C. with a community leader, Natasha Knapper. They said, “My building is going up for sale. I've been looking for places to move to, and I can't afford anything else in the neighborhood. I think it's finally happening to me. I think I'm getting priced out of D.C.”
Then I said something kind of flippantly that I had been saying for a while, “Let's buy this building.” “Let's buy that building.” And I said, “Let's buy your building.”
And they said, “Okay.” So we did it.
What is now called Baldwin House came about by us asking lots and lots and lots and lots of people for help. It's an entirely volunteer effort, where people show up with their time, their talents, and also their “tithe,” we say, for those that have excess money to move into the effort. Together, we stood up a community loan fund, and we brought in a lot of community backing to buy an apartment building and create a mutual aid hub and a community space.
It’s truly amazing to think that, through organizing, you were able to raise millions of dollars to buy an apartment building. Let’s say that I’ve never been a part of a mutual aid group and I’ve never organized like this, but I would like to. Where should I begin?
It starts by considering: What are small things that I can offer and what are small favors that I might like to ask for. Starting with something to offer feels easier because it’s like going around and giving people gifts.
I have a list of things that are very easy for me to offer. And then I also think about some easy things that I could ask for.
So for me, I love to cook. I can afford groceries, and I can afford to cook a bit extra and offer it to my neighbor by leaving it on their step. I mainly work from home, so it's easy for me to duck out in the middle of the day to let someone's dog out to pee or to bring in a package. And then perhaps I ask if I can park my car in a neighbor’s driveway if I can’t find a spot on the street.
And then it’s about getting those things circulating. So starting by offering things to neighbors. And again, these are people who are really close around you, or that you're already intersecting with in regular ways, like coworkers you see often. Start by making these small offers. Hopefully, people take you up on them. And then try asking for small favors. This is how we begin to rely on one another.
We've all already experienced mutual aid. I think of carpools when I was in school, and my mom worked late. A friend's parent who lived in our neighborhood would pick me up and drop me off. I think about study clubs. In school, I always struggled with science, but I could gather my friends, bring snacks, and make sure that we were going to study together. I was motivated to do it, because if we didn't, I was going to struggle, and I needed help. Study clubs would be an example of mutual aid.
When we engage in the practice, we can experience that it can feel good to do things together. It might eventually lead us into having more confidence that we should invest in more of the Commons, like government institutions, or even worker-owned businesses. Perhaps I would want to start something with people and run it together because I experienced some of the benefits that come from doing things with other people.
What you're describing with these exchanges is that you're giving in a way that you can, and you're capable of receiving in a way that might be different than yours, and you're not valuing them up against each other.
Yeah, that's it. It doesn't have to be, “I give you exactly what you give me.” I don't expect people to give me the same thing I'm giving them. The whole point is that we're getting something else. That's why it's worth it. I don't want someone to just give me back what I give. I want something to feel extra special because I don't already have it.
In order for this as an organizing practice to continue, people do need to feel like they're benefiting. It may not be one for one. Or it may not be that the person I gave something to gave something back to me. But it's instead that, by engaging in this thing together, I'm feeling some benefit. So I think that's part of why Facebook Buy Nothing groups can be helpful. I'm not tracking who claimed that free thing I put up. I continue to tune into the Facebook group, because there's something in here that I think is worthwhile to me, and I continue to put things up because it continues to serve a purpose for me that gets things out of my home that go to another place, and it feels nice to give back into something that I also want to take from.
When we begin to rely on each other and go in on joint ventures, we have to make decisions together. How do you do that within your organizing work?
Making decisions together is something that takes practice. But I've also been in leadership positions in vertical hierarchies, where I had all of the power to make the decision, and I didn't feel equipped to do so. That did not feel ideal for me.
So I do think that it's something that takes practice. But it's worth practicing it and getting better at it, because then it means that we can build institutions that are more reliable. The projects that I want to be a part of are ones where we do have more of a flat hierarchy, and that comes with more dispersed and shared decision making. The people in leadership seek to redistribute decision making power.
I think when we start assuming and believing that people make decisions entirely on their own, we start attributing victories to individual leaders. We start looking to charismatic leaders for all the answers as opposed to recognizing that, to create meaningful change, we need movements that have strong bases.
One of the leaders that I really look to, Ella Jo Baker, was an organizer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She was known to say that “strong communities don't need strong leaders.” We can look to each other for leadership.
We started our conversation talking about future visioning. And I wonder: What is that vision or that future that motivates you, that you're working toward?
We achieve a culture where people feel like mutual aid is familiar to them and part of their day-to-day practice where they're exchanging small favors with one another and making some decisions together.
After practicing doing that, we've achieved more people who are equipped to then build institutions that make up what many people call the solidarity economy, or the next economy. In this world, our economic institutions and businesses have more shared decision making. There are more people benefitting from the system, and more owners. Those same things can apply to our social services, like nanny shares and childcare cooperatives. More people are deciding how we administer these services, and more people benefit.
When more people practice mutual aid in their day to day life, they are ready and equipped to build up institutions for the next economy that we all deserve.
The Prompt
When I spoke with Gabrielle, I realized that I already practice mutual aid with my neighbors: I bake them bread, they bring me flowers. Are there ways that you’re practicing the giving and receiving that Gabrielle refers to as mutual aid? If you aren’t, how can you begin?