Mutual Aid: A Grassroots Model for Justice and Equity in Emergency Management

As communities grappled with a slew of concurrent disasters in 2020, grassroots mutual aid regained prominence, providing lessons for a more equitable approach to emergency management. Within emergency management, "mutual aid" has come to mean the specific legal mechanisms by which governments, non-governmental organizations, and private sector entities share resources. However, the term "mutual aid" has a much longer history of functioning outside of government and emergency management circles. With a recorded history in Black and Creole communities dating back to the mid-1700s, it has been widely used within communities of color for centuries. To see grassroots mutual aid in practice, the authors present a case study of Imagine Water Works' Mutual Aid Response Network (MARN) in New Orleans, which was developed in 2019 and responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and a record-breaking Gulf Coast hurricane season in 2020. Utilizing Facebook as a platform, the MARN's "Imagine Mutual Aid (New Orleans)" group saw its membership grow by 5,000 members from March 2020 to March 2021. Within the first week of Hurricane Laura's landfall, the group welcomed evacuated individuals from Southwest Louisiana and quickly facilitated thousands of requests for support, providing food, housing, clothing, medical devices, emotional support, emergency cash, laundry services, and personalized care for those in non-congregate shelters, as well as locally informed flood and hurricane preparedness information for subsequent storms. Grassroots mutual aid sheds light on root causes and existing gaps within emergency management and provides a model for autonomous community care.