Unlearning Individualism: Mutual Aid as a Pathway for Liberation by Sahibzada Mayed
Sahibzada Mayed is a creative alchemist with an extensive background in community organising, emancipatory research, participatory design, and speculative futures. Mayed's work draws upon the rich, emergent lineages of critical design movements that are actively transforming the status quo. Through their work, Mayed creates transformative experiences that cultivate shared joy, fuel our collective imagination, and weave visions for liberatory futures. As a serial entrepreneur and multidisciplinary creative, Mayed has received significant recognition globally for leading grassroots, intersectional work at the forefront of creative innovation and social impact.
Perhaps one of the most profound acts of resistance is our refusal to comply. Turning away from the dominance of the nation-state. Rejecting the falsehood that our dignity and worth should be measured by how much capital we produce. Disrupting the hierarchies of power designed to separate us from each other.
We are not meant to survive alone, nor in isolation. Yet, we’ve been conditioned to believe that competition is necessary for survival…that the way to achieve upward social mobility is through a politic of scarcity.
In this Uncharitable paper, I explore mutual aid as a pathway for liberation…
as resistance to the violence of individualism and separation,
as community care grounded in reciprocity and relational responsibility,
as resurgence rooted in ancestral ways of being and remembering,
as world building, where we nurture the futures we desperately need and dream
of.
This is both an urgent reflection and an invitation to shed the narratives that lead to fracture and to remember what it truly means to belong—to each other and the ecosystems we are part of.
Mutual Aid as Resistance
Mutual aid is often understood as a means of survival, a response to the apathy and violence experienced at the hands of institutions and states meant to protect us. When, in reality, we know that we cannot rely on these systems built on dehumanisation and erasure, designed to keep us subjugated in cycles of control and dependency. Then, the question becomes: what do we do when the very structures we’re told to trust abandon us?
In these moments—in the face of state-sanctioned violence, arising through the cracks, in the absence of institutional care—mutual aid emerges not as a random occurrence but rather as principled resistance and an act of collective refusal…
refusal to rely on systems designed to harm us,
refusal to normalise the cruelty of systemic violence and portray it as personal
failure,
refusal to be discarded and tossed to the margins.
Out of necessity, we turn toward alternative forms of community organising and resourcing in order to sustain ourselves and the realities we are shaping. Mutual aid demands a deep level of commitment and solidarity, uprooting the narratives that keep us isolated from each other.
At its core, mutual aid is about resisting the systems that are designed to make our lives precarious and building the infrastructure the state has failed to provide for our collective wellbeing. We must remember that our solidarity is a form of power and strength that allows us to break free from the shackles of containment.
Mutual Aid as Community Care
Many of us have been taught to feel ashamed when seeking support, to suppress our needs, and to deny ourselves the right to access care with dignity and self-determination. This is intentional, by design, to create fragmentation that hinders the possibility of collective resistance to disrupt the status quo and stand firmly against institutional violence.
Throughout history, mutual aid has been a potent strategy to reduce our dependency on the state and invest in our collective capacity to take care of one another, prioritising community safety. Many communities—from racialised backgrounds, migrant workers, refugee populations, queer and trans activists, disability justice organisers, sex workers, harm reduction advocates, and more—have long cultivated networks of care that exist outside of the confines of institutional structures that are built on the logics of control and punishment.
Mutual aid disrupts the notion that care is a transaction or a resource to be hoarded; instead, it fosters a sense of community and shared responsibility. It invites us to lean into relational responsibility and recognise how our wellbeing is tied to each other. When we learn to show up for each other, we begin to nurture relationships rooted in trust and reciprocity. Not just reaching for each other in moments of crisis, but shaping realities where access is woven into our culture and care is never conditional on worth.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, in their book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, shares their visions for a care-full future—one rooted in access intimacy and disability justice. They remind us that care is not an afterthought but rather a deeply political and relational practice that must be interwoven throughout our social movements.
“For years awaiting this apocalypse, I have worried that as sick and disabled people, we will be the ones abandoned when our cities flood. But I am dreaming the biggest disabled dream of my life—dreaming not just of a revolutionary movement in which we are not abandoned but of a movement in which we lead the way. With all of our crazy, adaptive-deviced, loving kinship and commitment to each other, we will leave no one behind as we roll, limp, stim, sign, and move in a million ways towards cocreating the decolonial living future. I am dreaming like my life depends on it. Because it does.”
Mutual Aid as Resurgence
Mutual aid is a sacred, ancestral practice that extends across multiple generations and timescapes. Many communities and cultures have abundant and rich lineages of mutual aid as a form of kinship and reciprocity.
Reflecting on my own histories and relationships with mutual aid, I didn’t always have the language for what “mutual aid” was. Yet, I knew what it felt and looked like in practice. How it was woven into our cultural norms and ways of being…etched into the memory and stories of our ancestors. How it manifested through the everyday acts of care and defiance…reminding us to hold each other gently and vulnerably. How it showed up in the subtle ways of expressing love…through an offering of gratitude or an exchange of breath.
To practise mutual aid is to remember what colonialism has sought to diminish and erase.
To practise mutual aid is to repair what has been ruptured, tending to the wounds stemming from isolation and separation.
To practise mutual aid is to grieve the possibilities that could be when we turn to each other, honouring our relational responsibility.
To practise mutual aid is to conjure an abundance of love that is already present in our shared being and becoming.
To practise mutual aid is an act of resurgence, returning to the knowledge and wisdom preserved in our collective consciousness.
Mutual Aid as World Building
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, author of The Mushroom at the End of the World, propels us toward imagining possibilities for collaborative survival:
“We are stuck with the problem of living despite economic and ecological ruination. Neither tales of progress nor of ruin tell us how to think about collaborative survival. It is time to pay attention to mushroom picking. Not that this will save us—but it might open our imaginations.”
Mutual aid reminds us that a new world isn’t just possible but is already in motion. It lives in the networks of care we are cultivating. It pulses through spaces of grief and healing where we gather. It ripples through our imagination. If we pay attention to what is happening around us, we begin to notice the ways in which a multitude of species practice worldbuilding, offering glimpses of the future possibilities we seek to nurture.
World building is not only a human endeavour, but rather a multi-species practice of becoming and emergence. We have many examples around us to learn from. Bees remind us how small acts of care ripple outward. As they forage and gather pollen, they enable the reproduction of plants, nourish ecosystems, and sustain food webs. Ants remind us what it means to move with a collective rhythm and how mutual aid refuses to leave anyone behind. When an ant is injured or wounded, the rest of the colony ensures they are tended to and taken care of as they heal.
Dandelions spread seeds of possibility—where the soil has been disturbed and the land has been forgotten—reminding us of the potential for reclamation and the need for paying attention to the people and places deemed disposable and unworthy of care. Similarly, mushrooms form networks of solidarity beneath the forest floor, sustaining life and redistributing nutrients. In the subtlety, we can notice how mutual aid thrives.
How do we locate ourselves within this intricate web of relationships—as alchemists of change, as weavers of interdependence, as stewards of community care?
Practising the Future Together
Practising the future together requires us to embrace imperfection and messiness as we fumble toward what is not yet known. The future isn’t some distant utopia waiting to arrive. The future is now. It begins with how we show up for each other and what seeds of possibility we choose to plant.
What if the futures we long for are already here, waiting to be embodied and practised into being?
What follows is a spell, aching to be breathed into practice:
We are not here to fit.
We are not here to conform.
We are here to fracture the mould,
to break free from the shackles,
to un-become what was forced onto us.
We do not gather in neutrality.
We gather in refusal.
Refusal of the colonial gaze.
Refusal to be erased by empire.
We do not seek utopia.
We seek a messy, queer, collective becoming,
a world where no one is deemed collateral,
where no one is left behind,
where our bodies are no longer battlegrounds.
So let this be a ritual of remembering,
of re-connecting,
of reclaiming what we have always known,
of returning to each other.