Co-optation and Concealment within the Mutual Aid-Industrial Complex

The Leimert Park Fridge, a formerly gratuitous neighborhood community fridge situated in the South Los Angeles neighborhood of Leimert Park. Photo by Ehrlich Yanai Rhee Chaney Architects.

When I was apprised that the community fridge in my neighborhood—which provided vital necessities like food and even personal hygiene products that were free for all—was taken down, I was devastated. The fridge was, for a while, a centerpiece of the Crenshaw District, a predominantly Black middle and working-class community nestled in South Los Angeles, and the place from which I come. At its heart lies Leimert Park Village, an area that serves as arguably the center of Black art, music, and culture in Los Angeles. During the pandemic, it also became a center of mutual aid in Los Angeles, made possible by local businesses and sustained by the efforts of community members. The most visible manifestation of these efforts was the Leimert Park community fridge, nestled snugly outside a coffee shop and vegan eatery. 

Donated by Los Angeles Community Fridges—a mutual aid group inspired by the New York City organizers who had pioneered community fridge efforts during the Coronavirus pandemic—the fridge came to be a vital resource for and place around which neighbors could coalesce in Leimert Park. From its being established in the neighborhood, the fridge provided innumerable residents with healthy and affordable food options in an area in which they are not always accessible. It also demonstrated the importance of community care and organizing, especially during a pandemic that amplified existing issues such as racial injustice, unemployment, and food accessibility. It was perhaps the most remarkable and pertinent example of mutual aid that I have ever seen unfold in front of my eyes. And now, it’s gone. The fridge was taken down because it was no longer seen as a sustainable effort by its organizers, but its absence is no less felt.

 The Leimert Park Fridge was mourned by the entire community because it was the paragon of Black-led mutual aid efforts. It was the embodiment of what Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis (and the next), recently defined as mutual aid: “collective coordination to meet each other’s needs, usually stemming from an awareness that the systems we have in place are not going to meet them.” The community fridge served as yet another chapter in the long history of mutual aid societies and other forms of “self-help” in Black and Indigenous communities. Part of why the effort was able to be such was because it was organized by a volunteer-based group of Black activists who coordinated to work together, hoping to see a change in their community. These efforts are very different from the professionalized nonprofit and corporate sectors, both of which have co-opted and disseminated misinformation about mutual aid, especially during the pandemic. In doing so, corporations and nonprofits have distorted the meaning of mutual aid, thus undermining its indispensably radical purpose and history.

One of the primary aims of mutual aid, especially for Black and Indigenous people, is to end their communities’ dependency on the white supremacist state through community care. By doing so, they threaten the foundations of the state and capitalism. The Black Panther Party’s community survival programs—and their subsequent co-optation—were a prominent example of inherently anti-capitalist efforts that were seen as a threat to the colonial status quo. These programs included free food, education, child care, health care, and legal aid programs. The Black Panthers even offered sickle cell screening programs, which were so successful that they opened 13 free health clinics across the country. The success of the Panthers’ survival programs were perceived as a threat to the U.S. government, and thus, they were infiltrated and violently dismantled, and a number of their members were murdered. To try and undercut the Breakfast for Children Program’s success, the U.S. Department of Agriculture even launched a breakfast pilot program in 1966, giving free meals to children whose families were below the poverty line – but without the radical political education the Panthers’ program provided. This example alone demonstrates both the literal and figurative violence of co-option. Mutual aid, when practiced by BIPOC, has led to community members being targeted, incarcerated, and murdered by the government. So, it should come as no surprise why one may be appalled at the co-optation and re-marketing of mutual aid by corporations and nonprofits. 

When corporations and nonprofits engage in what they consider to be mutual aid, they distort it. In a controversy in 2020, the Whitney Museum of American Art planned to exhibit works by Black artists who sold their prints for $100 towards mutual aid funds. The famed museum’s planned exhibition, titled Collective Actions: Artist Interventions in a Time of Change, was met with enmity by Black artists, who called out the museum on social media for their “predatory” process of acquiring artworks. These artworks would have been included in the museum library’s special collections, home to ephemera, artists books, posters and prints “that document how artists distribute published materials as a form of practice.” The artists who donated their works to charity were not consulted on the sale of their pieces to the Whitney or paid (each artwork sold at $100). It was meant for personal art collections, not multimillion-dollar art museums. When a well-monied organization like the Whitney interacts with mutual aid projects, it undermines mutual aid’s original radical purpose. The “mutual” component becomes lopsided, and the effort appears more like a publicity strategy than honest participation. Nonprofits and corporations that participate in “mutual aid” (which is often just charity, benefits, and other such provisions of support for marginalized groups) often do so to make themselves look generous, further entrenching wealth concentration. Instead of ameliorating conditions that hinder people’s survival, nonprofits and corporations entrench them.

Non-profit organizations have a large role to play in the co-optation of mutual aid. While they are seen as creating a path toward a more equitable future, nonprofits are inherently flawed down to their most elementary structure because of the nonprofit industrial-complex (NPIC). Scholar-activist Dylan Rodriguez defines the nonprofit industrial-complex as “the industrialized incorporation of pro-state liberal and progressive campaigns and movements into a spectrum of government-proctored non-profit organizations.” Put in simpler terms, the NPIC describes the intimate relationship between non-profit organizations, governments, and corporations. 

A primary consequence of the non-profit industrial-complex is the silencing of the original radical politics at the heart of nonprofits. Through being regulated by the IRS, which watches for any political activity that may jeopardize an organization’s 501(c)3 status, nonprofits have to comply with certain standards, one of which being that they cannot express explicitly contentious—particularly radical or leftist—politics. For instance, a 1938 addition to the tax code determined that any organization formed “to disseminate controversial or partisan propaganda is not an educational organization,” and therefore not eligible for the tax-exempt status associated with 501(c)3 classification. Organizations with 501(c)3 classification are eligible to receive tax-deductible contributions, while organizations without it are not, meaning that the former provides an incentive to financially support an organization while the latter does not. The result of these facts is a nonprofit sector that cannot engage in transformative, community-led justice. Through the non-profit sector, the state is able to monitor and suppress activity that could be deemed radical, ensuring that those organizations which do receive monetary donations do not rock the boat too much. Nonprofits with 501(c)3 status who engage in so-called “mutual aid” projects, therefore, could never undertake such without co-optation.

Mutual aid is about preserving lives, thriving, and building power. It cannot be allowed to be a way for corporations and non-profit organizations to avoid public scrutiny for their role in concealing—and even creating—economic and social inequity. By practicing mutual aid, communities make a long-term commitment to the upheaval of oppressive systems that don’t serve their needs; its initial purpose was to help these communities thrive. It is an inherently communal endeavor, one engendered from the continual failures of the state and capitalism to meet the needs within countless communities because these systems were never built for the communities in the first place. Indeed, mutual aid has been used in times of crisis to help the most marginalized in society survive, but that is not enough. Mutual aid must help these people thrive, not just scrape by. The co-optation of mutual aid undermines these purposes, thus minimizing its essential values. The Leimert Park fridge embodies the values of care, cooperation, and community; corporations and nonprofits do not. In the fight over who gets to successfully practice mutual aid, we must always choose community over corporation, and cooperation over co-optation.

Giselle Williams is a first-year student at Columbia College. She was born and raised in Los Angeles, California, and her interests include grassroots organizing, state violence, racial capitalism, anti-colonial movements, the prison–industrial complex, and U.S. empire. Giselle tentatively plans to major in History with a concentration in Philosophy.