The Faithful Fight Toolkit: Providing and advocating for mutual aid

In 2024, after Hurricane Helene devastated Asheville, North Carolina, making it virtually unrecognizable, community-based mutual aid networks played an outsized role in providing sustained care. During an organizing visit to the region, at a FEMA shower station, I met two kind women who approached me, asked if I was alright, and offered to pray for me. Their shirts indicated they were members of a church whose politics were firmly associated with Christian nationalism.

While these women may have been motivated by genuine humanitarian concern, white supremacist groups have often used natural disasters and economic precarity as opportunities to establish their presence and legitimacy in fragile communities. This was no different in Asheville.

This toolkit is part of the Faithful Fight series, developed in partnership with the Horizons Project. This toolkit is part of the Faithful Fight series, developed in partnership with the Horizons Project.

This is particularly troubling today given the close relationship between Christian nationalism and the Trump administration. While the politicization of aid long predates this administration, it has weaponized aid in profound ways.

They have threatened local governments, demanding that they carry out the Trump administration’s policy priorities if they want to receive aid. They have defunded organizations that are doing lifesaving work, while providing waivers to organizations that are aligned with them politically. They are dismantling the Federal Emergency Management Agency and moving forward towards massive cuts to programs designed to help Americans in need in their daily lives, from food and housing programs to Medicaid, Social Security, and more. In a context where at least 140 million people – people of every race, age, and gender identity – are poor or one emergency away from economic ruin, these actions are not only politically destabilizing, they are life-threatening.

Whether in response to disaster relief or deepening poverty, as a means to bolster recruitment, or as a combination of these, Christian nationalist institutions today have integrated the meeting material and spiritual needs into their political organizing and movement building. Indeed, as extremist forces take over our churches, schools, community institutions and every level of government – unabashedly advancing a divisive, anti-democratic agenda through the use of state violence, policy, religion, media, disaster relief and other projects of survival – there is a heightened need for survival organizing in faith and frontline communities that are aligned with democratic values of justice, equity and peace.

In A Matter of Survival: Meeting Unmet Needs and Building Power in Times of Crisis, the Kairos Center offers a model for organizing “projects of survival” around these values, while orienting communities towards building long-term political power. The model has two core dimensions:

Meeting material, unmet needs on a regular basis, for free.
Politicizing survival organizing to turn networks of care into networks of resistance and power-building.

Meeting unmet needs

This is the most critical element of projects of survival, the foundation upon which a sense of community and belonging can be established among frontline, poor and low-income communities who are navigating multiple, escalating crises.

During the pandemic, this included providing personal protective equipment (PPE), vaccines and information about COVID-19 in language, as well as food assistance, clothing drives, water deliveries, bike repairs, harm reduction, mobile immigration services or meeting physical and emotional health needs, free of charge, often in the same place, time and manner. In more recent times, food and basic needs distribution, medical care, transportation, community defense and care systems will be increasingly necessary, especially as core government programs and systems are dismantled and defunded.

Turning networks of care into networks of power

To anchor an organized political and social movement, the meeting of material needs must be politicized, coordinated and developed at scale. Through narratives of abundance, a commitment to political education and strategic cultural organizing, survival activity may be utilized to develop political leadership in these communities.

For example, in rural Washington, a ministry organized around its community’s unhoused population used their survival organizing to talk and teach about root causes to their suffering: why people were being evicted from their encampments, brutalized by the police or having their children taken away from them. Through this process, they connected individual experiences to a longer history of resistance and struggle. Personal stories became part of a broader narrative of tens of millions of people, across time and history, who changed how society was structured and organized.

There is a heightened need for survival organizing in faith and frontline communities that are aligned with democratic values of justice, equity and peace.

Establishing a wide network of projects of survival that is equipped to push back on authoritarianism and establish newfound community will take considerable time and resources. To this end, the report offers the recommendations below to rebuild a democratic society through these actions and activities.

Toolkit for providing mutual aid

Recognize that meeting unmet needs must be part of political organizing

Connect with survival organizing in local communities

“Rethink church” in these times

Use the resources that faith organizations and congregations have at hand – from physical space, means of transportation, staff and volunteers, as well as legal status and social legitimacy – to encourage new forms of building religious community. Integrate and expand ministerial activities to meet community needs. Consider sermons, Bible studies, hymns and other ongoing faith-based activities as opportunities for political education around confronting unjust systems, structures and theologies.

Build relationships with organizations, coalitions, and networks so as to multiply the impact of any single organization or entity

Tap into the power of cultural creation as both a project of survival and a way to support and build other projects of survival in community

Invest in base-building, community organizing, disaster relief, and social justice ministry – for the long haul

To adequately confront the rising tide of political extremism, and turn the crises at hand into organizing opportunities, abundant resources must be invested in base-building, community organizing, disaster relief, social justice ministry, and cultural creation to establish essential needs infrastructure that stitches together frontline, poor and low-income communities across the country. This must be long-term, patient investment, made available for new ideas and experimentation, especially in areas that have been conceded by progressive organizations.

Explore all toolkits in the Faithful Fight series.

These toolkits bring together strategies from religious leaders across denominations to help communities mobilize against authoritarian actions.
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About the Author

Shailly Gupta Barnes

Policy and Research Director for the Kairos Center

Shailly Gupta Barnes is the Policy and Research Director for the Kairos Center. She has a background in law, economics and human rights and has spent the past 20 years working with and for poor and dispossessed communities.

Learn more about Shailly Gupta Barnes