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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.

Using new empirical data from the UK focused on mutual aid and reciprocity, the purpose of this paper is to offer robust challenges to the logic and dominance of the commodification thesis. In finding mutual aid to be a significant coping strategy to get household tasks completed, in both affluent and deprived communities, the paper addresses the important question as to “why” mutual aid is so pervasive. Using qualitative insights as to “why” respondents engaged in mutual aid and reciprocity a considered response to this question, revolving around the instinctive and social nature of reciprocity, is made.

The research draws on previous Household Work Practice Studies, which have been influential in exploring the geographies of community self‐help. An in‐depth semi‐structured questionnaire, which adapts and develops previous successful approaches focused on mutual aid and volunteering, was employed across 100 households in two neighbouring wards in Leicester, UK.

The research found that the non‐commodified sphere of mutual aid was employed as a central coping strategy within the two communities investigated. The suggestion is that the extent of mutual aid in both deprived neighbourhoods and affluent neighbourhoods has been underestimated in previous research. However, the strength of the methodology resides with its understanding of the rationales being participation in mutual aid. This suggests that the natural and instinctive nature of reciprocity, and the social role that mutual aid plays within kin and non‐kin relations, helps explain its pervasiveness in the advanced economies.

The methodology and methods were designed to explicitly harness a deep qualitative understanding of the relationship and attitudes that households adopt toward their informal coping strategies, and mutual aid in particular. Thus though this approach has uncovered rich qualitative data to inform the key arguments, the quantitative findings must be treated as speculative rather than conclusive.

In undermining the commodification thesis, the paper concludes that alternate and better approaches toward harnessing “the economic” in society must be pursued by policy makers. Crucially economic policy which promotes co‐operation over competition within society should be seen as earning the qualification of “advanced” economic practice.

This is the first paper which explicitly looks at the pervasive nature of mutual aid within the advanced economies, using primary data from Leicester. The value is seen on three levels: first, the original arguments made which highlight the pervasiveness of this informal coping strategy; second, the manner with which these contemporary insights are then contextualised with reference to the wider literature; third, the way in which this research adds to the calls to fundamentally re‐think our dominant attitudes (and policies) toward the commodified and non‐commodified spheres of work in the advanced economies.

Much of the contemporary literature surrounding the barriers to community self‐help in the advanced economies has placed great emphasis on capital‐orientated barriers, such as a household's access to financial capital, time capital, human capital and social capital. Focusing explicitly on one‐to‐one mutual aid, and drawing on rich qualitative data from two urban communities in the UK, this paper aims to re‐visit the barriers to participation that prevent households from doing more for others in their community. In particular, the paper explores a range of entrenched social taboos that underpin the contested spaces of mutual aid. These include: “being aburden to others”, “false expectations/ inappropriate gestures”, “being taken advantage of” and “being unable to say no”. Furthermore, the paper also addresses the potentially problematic implications that the nature of work undertaken through mutual aid has for the social relationships that are involved. Despite finding previous UK‐based research findings focused on capital barriers to be highly appropriate when considering mutual aid, the paper argues that the current emphasis placed on these barriers in policy and practice is disproportionate. To address this imbalance, the paper concludes that a greater awareness of socially‐orientated barriers must be forthcoming if a more nuanced and accurate reading of mutual aid is to be achieved.

The research that is used to inform the findings of the paper is drawn from 100 in‐depth semi‐structured questionnaires conducted within households in the urban wards of West Knighton and Saffron in the city of Leicester, UK. The methods are designed to generate both quantitative and qualitative findings that engage explicitly with the informal work practices of households.

The paper explores a range of entrenched social taboos that underpin the contested spaces of mutual. These include: “being a burden to others”, “false expectations/inappropriate gestures”, “being taken advantage of” and “being unable to say no”. The main conclusions argue that both social barriers and capital‐based barriers to participation in mutual aid must be given more equal consideration in future academic and policy‐making discourse.

The qualitative nature of the research makes it difficult to meaningfully extrapolate the findings beyond the case studies used.

The research focused on the informal coping strategy of mutual aid offers a deeper insight into this coping strategy. In exploring the various capital and social barriers to participation, the findings offer ways for popular, academic and political communities to reflect on their own approaches to informal volunteerism, and if appropriate these can inform future approaches tasked with tackling these barriers and harnessing mutual aid in society.

In discussing the barriers to participation, the paper gives new insight into the contested geographies of mutual aid at the household and community level. To successfully overcome these barriers and further promote mutualism and community self‐help is seen to be both desirable and necessary particularly following the formal economic crisis that has raised serious questions for the economy and society in recent years.

The research not only adds robustness to previous emerging findings related to the resource‐based barriers to participation in mutual aid, but it also constructively asserts the relevance and centrality of social taboos. The paper argues that these social taboos must form a core point of analyses whenever barriers to greater levels of participation in mutual aid are discussed.

An increasing literature points to the efficacy and importance of mutual aid groups for people recovering from substance dependency. However, there is a paucity of qualitative evidence into the experiences and perceptions of service users attending UK-based mutual aid groups, and the implications they could have for recovery and mental wellbeing. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

A phenomenological approach was chosen to explore the experiences and perceptions of service users and mentors at a mutual aid group in Leeds. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with service users and mentors (ex-service users) involved with the project. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the data.

This paper focuses on the influence of mutual aid attendance on mental wellbeing. It was found that attendance seemed to have positive influences on providing structure, reducing stress and boredom, “broadening the mind” and providing service users with a social network that supported their recovery and mental wellbeing. However, it was also found that for those that have little outside the project, dependency on the group could develop, resulting in negative consequences on mental wellbeing.

This paper provides an increased understanding of why mutual attendance has influences on mental wellbeing, as well as the implications such impacts have on recovery trajectories.

Disaster mutual assistance (DMA) or mutual aid is a reciprocal arrangement between organizations that permits and prearranges one company to access resources from another company to recover from disaster impacts faster. As a practical tool to access response resources quickly, DMA can be an important element of an effective emergency management process, but the decision to provide (or not to provide) DMA is challenging and involves a number of factors. The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a study conducted to identify DMA decision criteria and their weights based on electricity companies operating in North America.

The authors employed a combination of Delphi and analytical hierarchy process (AHP) methods. Delphi method identified the decision criteria that should be considered before electricity utilities enact their DMA agreements. A standard AHP calculated the weights of identified DMA criteria.

In total, 11 criteria were identified and classified into three main groups: responding criteria, requesting criteria and disaster criteria. Of the 11, “Emergency Conditions” within the responding criteria group, “Extent of Damage” of the requesting criteria group, and “Size of Disaster”, associated with the disaster criteria group, had the highest weight. Three other factors (“Work Safety Practice”, “Natural Hazards” and “Availability of Resources”) carried a noticeable weight difference, while the remaining factors were weighted relatively lower.

At present, a decision to provide mutual assistance is highly subjective, based on “gut feel”, and dependent on interpersonal relationships between the requestor and the provider. However, mobilizing and dispatching electricity industry crews is a risky and costly operation for both requesting and responding companies and requires careful assessment for which a cost-benefit threshold has not been developed. This cost-benefit perspective is often frowned upon owing to the intended altruistic nature of DMA agreements and its influence on decision makers. The developed criteria in this study are intended to assist electricity companies in making a more informed and quantifiable decision when deliberating a request for mutual assistance. These criteria may also be used by assistance-requesting companies to better identify electricity companies that are more likely to provide assistance to them.

This study contributes to the literature by examining the current state of DMA in electricity utilities, identifying decision criteria and weighing such criteria to enable electricity companies in making more objective decisions, thereby, increasing the overall effectiveness of their disaster management process.

This paper traces how in Britain and Germany, for-profit and non-profit businesses coevolved with political-economic institutions. Starting in the late eighteenth century, Britain embraced the logic of liberal capitalism, although the path was not smooth. Over the same period, German states balanced both liberal and social-welfare ideals. Social-welfare ideals did not gain support in Britain until the start the twentieth century. The market logic embodied by for-profit businesses was more congruent with liberal capitalism than with social-welfare capitalism, so business corporations thrived more in Britain than in Germany. Yet in both countries, the growing number and power of for-profit businesses created problems for farmers, workers, and small producers. They sought to solve their problems by launching non-profit businesses – co-operatives, mutual-aid societies, and credit co-operatives – combining the ideals of community, enterprise, and self-help. British non-profits gained support from authorities by emphasizing their self-help and enterprise ideals, which were congruent with liberal capitalism, over the community idea, which was not. In contrast, German non-profits gained support by emphasizing all three ideals, as two were congruent with liberal capitalism and all three with social-welfare capitalism. Our analysis reveals how the success of different forms of business, embodying different institutional logics, depends on prevailing political-economic logics. It also shows how the existence and technical success of various organizational forms shapes elites’ perceptions and through them, societal-level logics of capitalism.

This paper discusses what local governments must do to prepare for various disasters, including terrorist attacks. It provides background information on preparedness and highlights lessons from prior research. It also identifies the process of establishing local ordinances, assessing risk, creating emergency operations plans, acquiring resources, instituting mutual aid agreements, training, exercising and educating the public. Finally, it concludes with recommendations to implement these preparedness measures.

This paper presents results from a participatory action research study with 46 LGBTQIA+ community leaders and 60 library workers who participated in four community forums at public libraries across the US. The forums identified barriers to LGBTQIA+ communities addressing their health questions and concerns and explored strategies for public libraries to tackle them.

Forums followed the World Café format to facilitate collaborative knowledge development and promote participant-led change. Data sources included collaborative notes taken by participants and observational researcher notes. Data analysis consisted of emic/etic qualitative coding.

Results revealed that barriers experienced by LGBTQIA+ communities are structurally and socially entrenched and require systematic changes. Public libraries must expand their strategies beyond collection development and one-off programming to meet these requirements. Suggested strategies include outreach and community engagement and mutual aid initiatives characterized by explicit advocacy for LGBTQIA+ communities and community organizing approaches.

Limitations include the sample's lack of racial diversity and the gap in the data collection period between forums due to COVID-19. Public libraries can readily adopt strategies overviewed in this paper for LGBTQIA+ health promotion.

This research used a unique methodology within the Library and Information Science (LIS) field to engage LGBTQIA+ community leaders and library workers in conversations about how public libraries can contribute to LGBTQIA+ health promotion. Prior research has often captured these perspectives separately. Uniting the groups facilitated understanding of each other's strengths and challenges, identifying strategies more relevant than asking either group alone.