Mutual Aid: An Approach to Community Preparedness and Neighborhood Resilience Networks
Introduction: The False Dichotomy of Preparedness
Nobody else is coming to save us. That’s what I believe now and what I believed back on March 7, 2020, when I drove to Kentucky to attend the Louisville Survival Expo & Gun Show. It was the weekend before COVID-19 hit, a weird and memorable few days I subsequently wrote about for Rolling Stone (read/download full version here). Based on the advertising, I’d imagined the event would be much more than a gun show; it’d be a congregation of likeminded, proactive worrywarts learning together the basics of solar power, food storage, and other off-grid skillsets, ultimately building an idyllic network of prepared humans willing to help each other survive and thrive during tough times (also known as: mutual aid).
But no. It was mostly guns.
Bob Gaskin, owner of the food supply business MRE Nation, delivered the sparsely attended expo’s keynote address, “Society Ending Events,” based on his scary book.
When an older gentleman in the audience asked him where all the prepper shows had gone (I, too, had found it hard to find a prepper event near my home in Charlottesville, which is why we drove seven hours to Kentucky), he explained that after Trump won, all the preppers that were scared of Obama calmed down. So, the prepper shows disappeared from the red states. Despite a proliferation of freaked-out, progressive preppers (like me), the promoters of these expos didn’t get the memo to shift their events to blue states.
What I gleaned from this is that some portion of our country is always afraid. And I expected Bob to peddle this fear, selling more MREs to stockpilers. But he had a deeper, more surprising message as well. He said:
“Most people preach this mindset that your stockpile is all you’ll have after The Event, so you can’t help other people. They teach people to become selfish pricks. But the stranger who comes to you for help may be the one who gets the lights back on in your community or the one whose grandson saves your daughter’s life 10 years from now. You just don’t know…
“What I do know is that it takes 18 years and nine months to replace an adult human. So, the biggest resource we‘re going to need for survival, and the most abundant resource that’s acquirable — our fellow man — is the one resource most preppers are not preparing to acquire.”
So that’s the core question I came away with: “Do we build bunkers and stockpile resources to protect ourselves, or do we share skills and build community to help each other? Isolation or cooperation?”
So in this article, I submit to you the concept of Community Preparedness, a potential bridge between individualistic prepping and community resilience.
Bob Gaskin at the Louisville Survival Expo, May 8, 2020
What is Community Preparedness?
Where the traditional, stigmatized version of prepping focuses only on protecting the individual or nuclear family — a Rambo-style, survival-of-the-fittest concept — Community Preparedness combines skills-based prepping with the principles of mutual aid planning.
It’s about building resilient communities rather than surviving alone at all costs.
It’s about developing distributed and sustainable resources, diversifying skill sets, and creating a support system for our physical, logistical, psychological, and spiritual needs.
And it’s increasingly crucial for us to learn how to do this, quickly. Because in the Year of our Lord 2025, I’m pretty sure nobody else is coming to save us.
This article (and Part 2 that will soon follow) will not focus on politics; they’ll explore:
a quick history of prepping in the United States (how it was practiced by our ancestors and how recent generations have transformed the concept)
why networks matter (with an intro to community resilience)
how your community or neighborhood can start a basic prepping network (regardless of anyone’s level of experience or expertise in doing such a thing)
I’m also working on a free, downloadable "Community Preparedness Assessment Tool" and a “Neighborhood Resilience Network Starter Kit” to help you plan and launch a group in your neighborhood/community and identify your role(s) within it. Stay tuned.
But first, stick with me for a little history…
The Evolution of Prepping
The concept of preparedness is probably as old as humanity itself. Our ancestors, from indigenous tribes to frontier settlers, understood that group survival depended on community resilience: skill-sharing, knowledge transfer, and interdependence. Despite the perceived cohesion and cooperation within these individual groups — be they Native Americans or European colonizers — the relationship between them was rife with mistrust, conflict, and violence (the “Cowboys vs. Indians” trope), culminating in genocide.
This is an essential part of American history we can’t ignore if we want to discuss preparedness. Because I’m pretty sure this is the dark seed of bunker mentality.
Let’s jump way ahead to the Great Depression: amid widespread hardship and food shortages, cooperative farming became a big thing (the concept of World War II "victory gardens" followed). Neighbors pooled resources, grew and shared diverse crops, and formed cooperatives, demonstrating that prepping could be a unifying, positive force rather than an isolating one (of course, our Depression-era relatives weren’t explicitly preparing against another group; they were dealing with a common economic disaster that transcended tribalism).
The shift towards more individualistic us-vs.-them survival probably began after World War II, fueled by the rise of Nazism/genocide, Cold War anxieties, and growing nuclear fears. Actual family bunkers or “fallout shelters” were all the rage. The 1960s and '70s saw a brief return to communal thinking with the back-to-the-land movement, but by the early 2000s, this vibe was overshadowed by a more politically charged form of prepping.
When I interviewed John Ramey, Founder of the apolitical emergency preparedness website, The Prepared, he explained that "the original prepper stigma — the 'crazy forest hermits' — stems from the Obama years, which coincided with the financial crisis, the rise of the Tea Party, and the explosion of social media." This era, aided by Rupert Murdoch-owned National Geographic’s reality TV show “Doomsday Preppers,” gave birth to the extremist stereotype: the lone-wolf, tinfoil-hat madman stockpiling supplies in a remote bunker.
COVID-19 proved to be a strange moment for the prepping movement. As global supply chains faltered, many people who had never considered themselves "preppers" suddenly found themselves scrambling for supplies (often by panic-purchasing from Amazon or Costco) and questioning their readiness for unexpected crises. This shift was reflected in the explosive growth of prepping resources — Ramey told me The Prepared website saw a 25x increase in traffic after the onset of the pandemic, for instance.
More importantly, the pandemic sparked a resurgence of community emergency management and mutual aid networks. It’s funny, we were instructed to stay at home, isolate ourselves, and social distance… yet across the political spectrum, people either openly flouted these directives and accepted the health risks to preserve the status quo, or else found innovative ways to connect or gather safely. One can argue that in either case, this was pure, ‘Murican defiance – I know my rights! – but I think it’s a simpler explanation: humans fear loneliness more than death. We like being around each other.
Evolutionarily speaking, humans are not designed to be solitary survivors. We depend on groups for survival. And hey, most of us survived the pandemic, but… what happens when life gets weird again? What then? What now?
Today, with more public services and government infrastructure in danger of being eliminated each day, and more threats from natural disasters (snowstorms, hurricanes, wildfires, etc.), I believe we're entering a new paradigm — one that balances individual readiness with community involvement. A little bit of ancestral roots mixed with a bunch of modern knowledge and technologies.
Maybe this next wave of emergency preparedness offers us an opportunity to bridge tribal divides and foster more resilient, sustainable communities. Or maybe we’re fucked. Politics aside, it's time to move beyond the bunker mentality and embrace a new era of networked preparedness — one where our strength lies not in isolation, but in our essential (and downright unavoidable) connections to one another.
Why Networks Matter More Than Bunkers
Remember that initial period of pandemic isolation, when we realized the situation would last more than a few days or weeks? The reasons we found it hard to follow instructions and isolate span our physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual needs.
Let's focus on the psychological toll of isolation, which COVID made painfully clear: according to the World Health Organization, the first year of pandemic-related isolation triggered a 25% increase in global anxiety and depression rates. Studies showed symptoms ranging from mild anxiety (50.9% of isolated individuals) to severe PTSD (reaching 53.8% in some populations).
Humans are social creatures and we deteriorate in isolation. That’s why solitary confinement is such a torturous punishment in prison settings. Even introverts need a solid amount of human connection. Many stereotypical preppers who started with a "lone wolf" mentality eventually sought out like-minded individuals or communities. As one such prepper told me, "You can have all the supplies in the world, but if you're alone with your thoughts for too long, those supplies won't matter much."
Then there are the practical constraints of individual stockpiling. One person or family trying to maintain a complete survival inventory faces daunting challenges:
Storage space limitations
Rotation of perishable supplies
Cost of supplies and redundant systems (food, power, water, heating/cooling)
Maintenance of equipment that will inevitably fail
The sheer impossibility of acquiring every skill needed in an uncertain future
If you slip and fall in your bunker and break your arm, all your carefully stockpiled guns won't help you set the bone. If your solar panels fail, you might wish you’d gained as much expertise in electrical engineering as in food preservation. If your child needs antibiotics, you'll wish you had a chemist next door. If your chainsaw fails, you’ll wish you knew a mechanic.
The reality is that no individual or family can possess all the skills, resources, and psychological resilience needed for long-term survival. The bunker mentality isn't just potentially lonely. It's dangerously stupid.
This is where mutual aid networks become essential, much more than an interesting thought experiment. They distribute the burden of preparedness, multiply available resources, and provide the human connection necessary for genuine resilience.
In the next section, we'll explore exactly how mutual aid can work, how it can fail, and why these collectives are a better short- or long-term survival solution than any individual bunker.
What is Mutual Aid?
When disaster strikes, it's generally not the government that arrives first on the scene (and if they do, they often create more problems than they solve) – it’s neighbors helping neighbors. This improvised, grassroots response is the essence of mutual aid.
It's not charity. It's a reciprocal exchange of resources and services for the benefit of all. As Dean Spade defines it in his book, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next):
Mutual aid is collective coordination to meet each others’ needs, usually from an awareness that the systems we have in place are not going to meet them. … In this context of social isolation and forced dependency on hostile systems, mutual aid – where we choose to help each other out, share things, and put time and resources into caring for the most vulnerable – is a radical act. …
Mutual aid is inherently antiauthoritarian, demonstrating how we can do things together in ways we were told not to imagine.
A big reason why this system is hard for us to imagine is because we’ve been taught – by biological science, by capitalism, etc. – to imagine that fierce competition is the only way to win. The term was popularized in 1902 by Russian anthropologist and anarchist philosopher Pyotr Kropotkin, whose book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution showed countless ways that cooperation and collaboration in the human and animal kingdoms are far more prevalent than the Darwinistic "survival of the fittest" narrative might suggest.
Kropotkin points out that “survival of the fittest” wasn’t even Darwin’s term – that he’d produced a much more nuanced and complex argument in The Origin of the Species, which was later misinterpreted or intentionally spun to foster competition. In The Descent of Man, Darwin writes, “Those communities which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring."
Kropotkin clarifies: “[Darwin] intimated that in such cases the fittest are not the physically strongest, nor the cunningest, but those who learn to combine so as mutually to support each other, strong and weak alike, for the welfare of the community."
While Kropotkin's work laid important groundwork, modern research has both validated and expanded upon his observations that many species of fish, birds, and insects exhibit collaborative behaviors or create symbiotic relationships with other species. Even mammals and carnivores display these tendencies:
African wild dogs hunt in packs and share their kill, even with members who didn't participate in the hunt.
Chimpanzees share tools and teach each other new skills.
Dolphins support sick or injured members of their pod, helping them breathe by pushing them to the surface.
Ostriches and zebras form mixed herds, combining the ostrich's keen eyesight with the zebra's acute hearing for better predator detection.
And what about humans?
Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Rise in Disaster is one of my favorite books ever, and challenges the myth of social breakdown during crises, instead documenting the emergence of collaborative altruism and resourcefulness among people. Here are a few examples:
1906 San Francisco Earthquake: While police focused primarily on “looters,” residents quickly organized soup kitchens, community housing, and aid distribution centers. The disaster brought down social barriers, with the wealthy and working class working side by side in relief efforts.
9/11 in New York City: As official systems were overwhelmed, ordinary citizens stepped up. Boat owners conducted a massive maritime evacuation of Lower Manhattan, while impromptu volunteer networks emerged to support first responders and victims' families.
Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans: Where a government organization like FEMA failed, community groups like the Common Ground Collective provided food, medical care, and rebuilding assistance to neglected neighborhoods.
More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic sparked a global resurgence of emergency relief networks and similar entities:
Invisible Hands: Founded by young volunteers, this NYC organization delivered groceries and supplies to vulnerable residents, expanding to thousands of volunteers across several states.
Covid-19 Mutual Aid UK: This network of local groups provided everything from food deliveries to emotional support calls, demonstrating how quickly communities can organize in times of need.
Mutual Aid Disaster Relief (MADR): This grassroots network, which had experience in hurricane relief, pivoted to COVID-19 response, providing resources and coordination for local relief efforts across the U.S.
The networks formed during crises often evolve into long-term community organizations, creating a framework for ongoing support.
If you’d like to dig into any of these books, I recommend this LitHub reading list published by Kim Kelly on the eve of the 2025 presidential inauguration.
Benefits of Mutual Aid
The multiplier effect of shared resources, capabilities, and skills is simple mathematics, with profound implications: when ten households each invest in some basic backup food/water, and pool their tools, expertise, and emergency supplies, they don't just get ten times the resources for a fraction of the price — they create exponential possibilities. A single household might struggle to afford a generator, but a community can easily share one. One person's knowledge of electrical systems combines with another's plumbing expertise and a third's woodworking skill to create a web of complementary capabilities. Zebras + ostriches.
Community-based emergency preparedness isn’t only about super fancy, organized, or advanced skills. Again, during the pandemic, we likely saw mutual aid in action when your neighbor offered to do a bulk buy store run, reducing cost and exposure risk while ensuring everyone had access to essential supplies.
The physical and psychological benefits of community connection during crises are equally powerful. Studies of disaster survivors consistently show that social bonds are often more crucial for survival than material resources.
During Hurricane Sandy, neighborhoods with strong social networks had significantly lower mortality rates among vulnerable populations. Research shows that people who feel connected to their community experience less anxiety and depression during crises, are more likely to follow public health guidelines, and recover more quickly from trauma. As one organizer in Queens noted during the pandemic: "The food deliveries kept people fed, but the conversations at the door kept them going."
Overcoming Challenges in Community Preparedness
Building community resilience isn't just about stockpiling supplies or sharing skills – it's about navigating the complex human landscape of diverse beliefs, values, and fears. One of the biggest challenges in this field is the facilitation of meetings, for instance. This collaborating-with-other-humans stuff is hard, and landmines abound. Here are some potential problems inherent in a more communal approach to emergency preparedness.
Common Pitfalls of Mutual Aid
Dean Spade lists the four most likely tendencies that cause these groups to fail or even deepen the problems they’re ostensibly trying to solve. In brief:
Deservingness Hierarchies: creating a false distinction between those deserving vs. undeserving of aid based on some moral criteria or discrimination that typically excludes those most in need of help (e.g., “displaced renters and homeowners are sympathetic victims, while people who were previously displaced by the ordinary disasters of capitalism — and are especially vulnerable after an acute disaster like a storm or fire – are blameworthy and do not deserve aid.”)
Saviorism & Paternalism: assuming that those providing aid are superior and know best how to fix/save the communities they claim to support (e.g., short-term mission trips).
Co-optation: allowing the stewards of the status quo — including all levels of government — to endorse or acquire mutual aid efforts as a way of distracting or deflecting from their own failings (e.g., politicians lionize boat owners who spontaneously organized to rescue people in flood zones without examining their failure to mobilize and rescue these citizens).
Collaboration with Efforts to Eliminate Public Infrastructure: accidentally or intentionally supporting efforts to privatize public services, saying they should “operate more like a business.” (e.g., groups supporting the private firefighting industry for wealthy homeowners while everyone else is left less protected).
Money: letting the root of all evils take the lead (e.g., a loose collective of neighborhood volunteers can evolve into a larger, more professionalized system where funds are needed, reimbursement is expected, and people want to be paid for their time).
Burnout: extended, difficult work of any kind can foster exhaustion, resentment, and toxicity if left unchecked and unsupported.
Again, Spade’s book is a great resource for understanding and addressing all of the above. As you develop your system, keep a close eye on the direction you’re heading to ensure you’re not actively or unwittingly falling into any of these traps.
Addressing Political Divides
While many such entities begin with a targeted social cause or vulnerable population in mind — and a relief network may spring up to simply mitigate harm — and may attract likeminded members, the reality of a neighborhood resilience network is that it’s likely more heterogeneous. You can’t handpick all your neighbors – you live with who you live with.
I won’t go deeply into politics here. Above all, I’d recommend NOT treating your network as a forum to discuss politics, but rather to reaffirm a shared commitment to community resilience.
To deal with the inevitable divides, first take a breath. Share personal stories of why you want to start or join such a network. Maybe a staunch conservative talks about wanting to keep her kids safe during natural disasters. Maybe a progressive activist speaks about building sustainable and healthy local food systems. Their goals are different and their skill sets likely are too, but their core values — which typically boil down to keeping one’s self and family safe — might overlap considerably.
If you’re gonna dive into this, consider establishing a simple rule: focus on actions/responses, not ideologies. Don't debate climate change; just focus on flood preparedness. Don't argue about broad federal government policies; just plan hyper-local neighborhood response strategies. This approach doesn't erase our differences, but it might help us work together despite them.
The Security Question: Beyond Bunkers and Bullets
When I bring up community preparedness, someone inevitably asks: "But what about security? What if things get really bad?" And what they likely really mean is, “What about guns?”
It's a fair question. After all, strong community bonds alone won't stop a heavily armed “militia” intent on doing harm. But perhaps we're asking the wrong question.
During my research into community resilience, I've found that the most secure neighborhoods aren't the ones with the most guns — they're the ones with the most connections. During Hurricane Katrina, while the media focused on armed confrontations and looting, many communities quietly protected themselves through organized networks of communication, shared resources, and collective action.
The Black Panther Party understood this dynamic. While they're remembered for armed community defense (which, it bears mentioning, actually catalyzed common sense gun reforms at the time, introduced by the NRA), their most effective security measure was their mutual aid programs, especially their free breakfast program. As Dean Spade writes:
“Recognizing the program’s success, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover famously wrote in a 1969 memo sent to all field offices that “the BCP [Breakfast for Children Program] represents the best and most influential activity going for the BPP [Black Panther Party] and, as such, is potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for.”
The Black Panthers recognized that food security, healthcare, and education created more internal safety than weapons ever could. A community where people are fed, housed, and cared for is inherently more secure than one bristling with arms but lacking basic necessities. This mutual trust is what helped them unify and avoid infighting amid very real threats from the state.
This doesn't mean ignoring security concerns. Instead, it means approaching them through the lens of community care. Here's what this kind of security might look like in practice:
Regular community gatherings that put "eyes on the street"
Know-your-neighbor programs and informal social gatherings to break down barriers
Shared spaces that encourage natural surveillance
Clear communication protocols for emergencies
Regular check-ins with vulnerable neighbors
Mental health and addiction support networks
Conflict resolution mechanisms, like peer mediation
Youth education and engagement programs
Some Security Responses
When security issues do inevitably arise, consider a graduated response:
Communication and de-escalation
Community presence and observation
Non-violent intervention
Engagement with appropriate authorities
Community defense (as an absolute last resort)
The reality is, your community is probably more likely to face a medical emergency, power outage, or natural disaster than an armed confrontation. Your security resources are better spent preparing for these scenarios.
Back at the Louisville Survival Expo, I spent a lot of time with Chris Begley, an archeologist, professor, survivalist, and author of The Next Apocalypse: The Art and Science of Survival and the forthcoming The Optimist’s Guide to the End of the World (and Lesser Catastrophes):
“When I’d asked him about guns, I assumed he’d encourage me — here’s a lifelong Kentuckian, a gun-owner who first shot an AR-15 at age eight, who spent most of his archeological career in El Salvador and Honduras, countries with chart-topping homicide rates.
‘In every situation I was in with armed bad guys,’ Begley tells me, ‘my having a gun would’ve gotten me killed. If you have a gun, they just kill you and take your gun. You’re not going to Rambo it out with them. Even if you dispatch a few, it’s going to escalate until you lose…
‘When you have a family, you don’t decide: “I’ve got six kids and the bad guys have five kids, so after we go back and forth, I’m going to have one kid left, so I win!” No. You leave, with all six of your kids. You survive and start over, hopefully with likeminded people. It’s not the armed loner or militia team that survives. It’s the politician — the charismatic person who can talk to people and build a larger collective. That’s who survives.’”
I’m convinced that true security isn't about having the most ammunition — it's about having the strongest relationships. It's about building a community where people look out for each other, where basic needs are met, and where problems are addressed before they become crises.
The question isn't "How do we defend against threats?" but rather "How do we build a community worth protecting?"
The Future of Preparedness is Collaborative
The journey starts with a single conversation. Maybe it's asking your neighbor about their generator. Maybe it's chatting with a coworker about gardening and local food systems. Or maybe it's with yourself, deciding that you're ready to move from worry to action.
Mine started with a neighborhood group post I sent on March 17, 2020. It included a link to a survey (this easy Google Form that I’ll describe more fully in Part 2 of this series).
I’m embarrassed to admit that despite getting dozens of responses at the time, I failed to follow through and turn that information into a communicable system. Probably, like you, I don’t really know how to do any of this. I’m no expert. Same as all the rest of the articles on this site — I’m starting at the beginning, willing to learn new things and unlearn old ones.
Personally, the thing that freaks me out most isn’t some conspiracy theory or even a cataclysmic weather event. It’s human panic and desperation. In the absence of some outside force strong enough to cause this, authoritarian governments often try to create this panic and desperation, widening political gaps and stoking each side’s deep-seated mistrust of the other.
But there’s no reason why my little neighborhood — and every neighborhood — can’t overcome this and become its own resilient ecosystem of skills, resources, and connections. Our first response to any crisis shouldn’t be panic, it should be a well-coordinated community plan. Preparedness doesn’t have to be about fear, but about empowerment. This isn't some utopian vision — it's a future any of us can build, one neighborhood and network at a time.
We’re just scratching the surface, but I imagine my neighborhood becoming an increasing source of everyday strength. We'll start a tool-lending library that will save members thousands of dollars. Our skill-sharing workshops will spark micro-businesses and career changes. Our community garden will eventually supply fresh produce to a local food bank.
This is the power of collaborative preparedness. It doesn't just help us survive crises — it helps us thrive in everyday life. It turns neighbors into friends, streets into communities, and preparedness into a way of life.
