Welcome to Getting Curious. I'm Jonathan Van Ness and every week I sit down for a 40-minute conversation with a brilliant expert to learn all about something that makes me curious.

On today's episode, I'm joined by Dean Spade, a writer, activist, and associate professor at Seattle University School of Law where I ask him, what's mutual aid?

Welcome to Getting Curious. I'm Jonathan Van Ness. I'm so excited for our guest this week. We have Dean Spade. You have spent your entire career working to build queer and trans liberation based on racial and economic justice, including this one of my very favorite parts of the sentence, including founding the Sylvia Rivera Law Project.

Your new book is Mutual Aid, which I just have to say, after having read. It starts off as Mutual Aid, but then it turns into like the stunning advice book for all things life and maybe have lots of questions on how you figured all this stuff out. So, maybe Jane, how are you and welcome to the show?

Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. Me too. And also, there's some very stunning natural light on your face and you are coming to us from Seattle, right?

Yes, the natural light is unusual.

Yeah, so I'm really happy that Seattle's having a sunny day. And on that note, I really just want to kind of jump right in. One thing that we've talked about on getting curious in the past is the nonprofit industrial complex. And we've also talked about some of the ways that, you know,

charities like, sometimes it doesn't reach to the levels of the people who needed the most. And so in learning about mutual aid, I was just like, this is amazing. I think what you study and what you started is also so amazing.

So just to get everyone on the same page, can you tell us what mutual aid is?

Definitely. Yeah. So mutual aid is the word we use for the part of social movement work where we're getting together to meet people's survival needs based on a shared understanding of the kinds of crises people are facing are created by the systems we live under and work and to buy them.

I also think of it as being particularly important because it's often the on-ramp for people into social movement organizing.

I also tend to show up to social movements because they're like pissed and scared and like something terrible is happening and they like need help and then they meet other people who also think that things shouldn't happen.

And then they work on it together both directly supporting individual people in struggle and also trying to like get to the root causes of it.

So maybe I show up because I'm like facing all these horrible conditions in my housing. My landlord is neglectful and, you know, profiteering all these things.

I'm going to meet with people who are going to help me with my specific individual case. I don't get addicted or whatever, but also I end up joining the tenants rights movement my city or we were going to rent strike with all the other tenants who have the same landlord or we can sell the same story like I show up because I'm undocumented and I'm scared about what's happening and I'm here to find out what to do to protect my family.

I think there's a rate of my job and then I end up like getting together with other people who are undocumented and their allies and accomplices to also like fight to close the detention center down in our region.

Like this is like it's this kind of part of the work that is about like people's immediate needs, but it's tied to these like deeper transformative strategies and like in order to do the transformative strategies you need lots of people.

It seems like but maybe doesn't start with like lots of people. So what are some of the like contemporary examples of mutual aid that like if people are so like I don't.

Sounds great. Dean just said like a lot of words that I'm obsessed with, but I what are some more content. I know for myself I this really annoying habit of being obsessed with like examples and I hate that about myself.

I mean, I just kidding. I love that about myself. I beat examples. Yeah. Well, obviously I think the most visible mutual aid right now like that's caused a lot of people to learn about mutual aid recently is all the mutual aid people are doing around COVID.

So all these really amazing projects for people are doing.

Like we're going to deliver groceries people who can't leave the house because they are more likely to get sick with COVID and be really in danger.

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