Mutual aid makes a difference when disaster strikes. What about after? | Canada Voices

Bear River Fire Chief David McCormick was building his new garage during a rare day off from work this August when the alert sounded on his pager. A fire had sparked deep in the forest in Nova Scotia’s Digby County.

Chief McCormick, 52, has been a volunteer firefighter for more than half his life, so he’s used to these interruptions. While rushing to the fire station, he called Alex Cranton, 32, the deputy chief at the Annapolis Royal Volunteer Fire Department, just across the county line.

“A call’s coming in,” Chief McCormick told him. “You’re coming, too.”

Deputy Chief Cranton was almost home from work, looking forward to seeing his wife and one-year-old son, but he immediately turned his pick-up around.

The two men have known each other for years; they’d worked together on hundreds of calls. Their co-operation is part of the mutual aid agreement between the fire departments in the area, including a third in nearby Smith’s Cove; no matter which department has jurisdiction, when a building or forest catches fire, all three respond.

That agreement is now in writing, but Chief McCormick remembers when it was “a gentleman’s handshake,” and happened just the same.

“It means a lot,” says Deputy Chief Cranton, “to know who has your back.”

Human beings have a long and storied history of having each other’s backs, despite disaster movies – and the alarmist rhetoric of certain politicians – suggesting that, in a crisis, regular people become marauding mobs of violent looters.

This dangerous fiction sows suspicion and fear, even though published accounts of real-world disasters show that we are, on the whole, generous, resourceful and kind to each other when life turns unexpectedly upside down.

Most of the time, in a hurricane, flood or fire, the first responder to offer you help is not a professional, but your neighbour.

The first years of the pandemic, we should remember, proved our mettle.

While the anti-mask, anti-vax crowd was the noisiest gong, many more Canadians were busy delivering groceries and shoveling driveways for sick or elderly strangers, organizing phone chains to comfort the lonely and writing spirit-lifting letters to health care workers – well aware that they might, at any time, require assistance themselves.

Dozens of mutual aid groups popped up on Facebook, part of a spontaneous, grassroots movement to deliver help and care that the government, and even traditional charities, could not – or would not – provide.

But when flames are doused and the pandemic recedes, many of us relax back into our more individualistic ways, where life is a solo, zero-sum competition: lock your doors and look after yourself.

How’s that going? This year, the income gap between rich and poor in Canada set a new distance record. Visits to food banks have nearly doubled since 2019, to more than two million a month in July, 2025. A YMCA Canada survey last year found that 60 per cent of Canadians felt disconnected from their communities.

A lot of factors contribute to the issues we face today, from geopolitics to climate change. But as a society, we’re also experiencing the consequences of “who can get the most, fastest,” says Nicolas Parent, part-time professor at the University of Ottawa who is working on a book about mutual aid.

The idea that a good start and hard work will guarantee a comfortable life is unravelling.

Now “there’s a whole class of privileged individuals – and I include myself – coming to terms with the fragility of their economic position,” says Dr. Parent.

They see their kids falling behind. Jobs disappearing and housing unaffordable. Climate change escalating.

We need each other more than ever. Mutual aid rises out of adversity and necessity, which is why it has long been so effectively practiced in vulnerable and marginalized communities who couldn’t count on government, or a fair shot in the free market.

When groups of people come together to tackle a local problem the government isn’t addressing, they often create practical solutions: co-operative housing, turn-taking child care, community gardens.

“The next thing you know, you have more eggplants than you need, and you’re sharing,” says Dr. Parent. “Instead of saying market forces control things, it’s actually the humans who control things.”

In 2017, while travelling for his doctorate research on refugees, Dr. Parent met a group of Venezuelan musicians crowded into a house in Lima, Peru. They were sharing their instruments so they could earn more money in pooled tips by performing from early morning to after midnight in a nearby square. While some slept, others played; when someone was sick, another musician would fill in.

Of course, in interviews with Dr. Parent, they said they’d prefer life to be easier. “But I’ve got these people,” they told him. “I can get through this because we’re all in it together.”

Observing the co-operation among Syrian refugees in Turkey, the Congolese in Rwanda, and the musicians in Peru, Dr. Parent began to question the assumptions he’d learned growing up in Canada about how humans should operate with each other – beliefs that were more individualistic than collective, more anchored in the zero-sum competition of market economics.

Back home, he’d watched people pretend not to see a homeless person, clearly in distress, on the sidewalk. But in Turkey, he observed a more collective spirit. In one dramatic incident, passersby immediately intervened, separating a woman from a gang of aggressive, harassing men. Among the country’s Syrian refugees, he met widows who needed to work to support their family, and took turns breastfeeding each other’s children, a form of milk kinship born out of war-torn necessity. The refugees also worked together to organize their own education and fix roads left derelict by the government.

“There is protection within a larger body of people who have these common values,” he says. “It is ultimately more secure than being isolated.”

And yet, individually, we are often deeply afraid of being in debt to another person, believing it better to be self-sufficient. “Debt doesn’t have to be a burden,” counters Dr. Parent. “It can actually be a source of purpose and meaning.”

In the examples he’s studied, receiving help doesn’t create obligation, it builds community. For this reason, reciprocity is a moral value of most religions and many philosophers: doing unto your neighbours as you would want done for you binds us together.

This is why advocates call mutual aid “solidarity, not charity.” In her book, Mutualism, Sara Horowitz describes how her parents took turns with other families to provide child care, paying each other in Monopoly dollars; when their “cash” ran low, families stepped up their babysitting to earn more.

Not every collective effort inspires wider political action; many COVID-19 groups dissolved once the lockdown ended. But others pivoted to advocate for issues such as affordable housing and food security.

Mutual aid has been at the root of most major changes in society, Ms. Horowitz argues. When enslaved people fled the American South to freedom, they were supported by shared assistance from northern Black communities, strengthening the social bonds and resources in the fight to abolish slavery.

The first unions formalized mutual aid among factory workers, expanding protections and benefits to employees. In 1994, after Ms. Horowitz learned as a new lawyer she would only be hired on contract and without benefits, she followed the example of those labour leaders by founding the freelancer’s union for gig workers.

In the 1960s, the Black Panthers organized free breakfasts, feeding thousands of children before school across the United States, as well as clothing drives, bus rides and housing and health clinics to support and empower neighbourhoods during the Civil Rights Movement.

When governments were slow to provide medical treatment to AIDS victims in the 1980s, and some doctors and nurses refused to treat them at all, the LGBTQ community organized their own care, strengthening the collective fight for wider equality.

Earlier this year, as the trade war tanked relations with the United States, Canadians met online and at protests to unite against President Donald Trump’s taunts that Canada become the 51st state.

And now, for consecutive summers, firefighters and regular citizens across Canada have travelled from their own homes to try to save our burning forests and support those who have been evacuated.

The August fire in Digby County was just one example of the finest elements of mutual aid. It begins with individuals, someone such as Kelly Burmeister, 39, a South African who volunteered for the Bear River department to give back her new community; she was one of the first to arrive with Chief McCormick’s crew at the blaze. Or Jason Rock, 55, a former IT professional who’d given up his quiet retirement to serve Annapolis Royal, the second fire department to pull up at the scene.

Working as a mission-focused group – another prominent aspect of mutual aid – they tackled the fire crackling in the parched forest. Bear River firefighters circled the flames to contain them. Under Deputy Chief Cranton’s direction, Annapolis Royal set up portable pumps in a nearby lake to refill the tankers.

This time, they got lucky: there was no wind to stoke the fire. They held it to less than two acres, and with the help of the Smith’s Cove crew, soaked the ground to prevent it from re-igniting.

Among the firefighters, you can also see how mutual aid isn’t limited by people saying “that’s not my job” – but instead responds nimbly to need. Although it’s not in their official agreement to provide this assistance, a second department will show up for a major motor vehicle accident to close the road, preserving the scene and, most importantly, keeping the first crew of responding firefighters safe from oncoming traffic.

This kind of co-operative culture is contagious: in the hallway at the Bear River fire department, there’s currently a box of toothpaste and toothbrushes, the spontaneous donations from a grateful community.

“Disaster reveals what else the world could be like,” writes Rebecca Solnit in A Paradise Built in Hell, her 2009 book about altruism during natural disasters. “The citizens any paradise would need – the people who are brave enough, resourceful enough and generous enough – already exist.”

On a Saturday in late September, in the most romantic example of mutual care, Dana Tucker Khan, a public servant in Winnipeg, married Lyle Ford, a university librarian, at a wedding ceremony officiated by Rae Gunn, a doula.

All three met when they began volunteering for the Winnipeg Mutual Aid Society. Ms. Tucker Khan, 45, and Mr. Ford, 49, fell in love over the winter of 2023, discussing books and listening to punk music while delivering food across the city. They were engaged a year later, around the time that a local bakery began dropping boxes of frozen bagels on Ms. Khan’s doorstep. Over six Saturdays, with a handful of volunteers, including Mx. Gunn, they successfully distributed about 10,000 bagels to individuals, churches and low-income and senior residences.

The scale of Bagelstrom, as Ms. Tucker Khan dubbed it, was nearly surpassed this July by an offer from a grocery store to donate what was described as 300 pounds of produce.

“We went there and it was not 300 pounds,” Ms. Tucker Khan says. “It was about 900 pounds.” She called in Mx. Gunn’s help, and they crammed all the cabbage and kumquats and apples and oranges into two SUVS and one hatchback, brought them home to Ms. Tucker Khan’s and put the word out.

Midnight came and went, and they were still giving away fruit and vegetables. What you learn pretty quickly volunteering for the society, says Ms. Tucker Khan, is that food insecurity in Canada is more of sharing problem than a shortage issue.

A prevailing philosophy of mutual aid is that nobody has to justify their need, or give to receive. The Winnipeg society never asks people for personal information. On their Facebook group, which now has more than 20,000 members, backstories must be deleted before a post is approved to avoid both judgment and favouritism.

Every request is equal and taken on faith. “If a millionaire is asking for our help,” Mx. Gunn, 36, says, “they must have a reason.”

Ten years ago, when Ms. Tucker Khan was a master’s student and pregnant with her first child, she went to a food bank for formula. Needing that help felt shameful, she says, but it shouldn’t. “It’s okay to rely on your community,” she says. “No one can do this on their own, right?”

The Winnipeg society doesn’t receive government funding and has no paid staff members. It recently registered as a non-profit to better access donations, but the group’s bylaws were carefully written to require consensus decision-making, says Mx. Gunn, who is named as the president only for the sake of official paperwork. The group, they say, plan to use their official status in “Robin Hood fashion.”

People can ask for anything they need – holiday dinners, help with chores or babysitting, bike repairs, lawn mowing, bus tokens, rides to appointments.

Not long after she joined in 2023, Mx. Gunn was recovering from a difficult surgery and trying to care for their two children while their husband worked outside the home. They posted a request, and volunteers showed up to clean and provide cooked meals.

In turn, Mx. Gunn and their husband have helped a grieving senior by packing up and donating the contents of the apartment belonging to the senior’s friend who had just died. And when a woman asked for help handling her father’s estate and funeral paperwork, Mx. Gunn did the research and coached her on Zoom.

“What we really try to emphasize in this group is that you absolutely have something to give, whether it’s time or companionship,” says Ms. Tucker Khan. “Everyone’s rich in some way.”

Peter Kropotkin was, quite literally, rich. The Russian prince born in the late 19th century was expected to serve in the military, but managed to be stationed in remote Siberia, far from any action. While working there as a geographer, he was introduced to anarchist communism ideology – later publishing an elegant argument for mutual aid that still holds sway with modern scientists and philosophers.

Kropotkin challenged Darwin’s “survival of the fittest,” proposing instead that animals that know how to work and play together, and protect each other – including the weakest among them – had the best chance of thriving.

It was not love, he suggested, that inspired horses to form a ring around attacking wolves, or those same wolves to hunt in a pack. An evolved instinct taught them that collective, social support was superior to isolation, he argued.

In the years since, many examples of mutual aid among individual animals from different families, and even between different species, have been documented – from the penguins that huddle for warmth, to the vampire bats that regurgitate dinner for hungry companions, to the oxpecker that dines off the rhino’s pesky ticks.

Disillusioned by his entitled noble peers, and dismayed by government neglect of the regular citizen, Kropotkin suggested that human beings would be healthier and happier learning from nature’s example. On this point, he was also prescient: modern research has consistently confirmed that the single most scientifically supported secret to happiness is social ties.

As a bonus, nature itself also benefits: mutual aid programs are endorsed by climate change groups as a way to reduce food waste and consumerism by putting existing resources to use more efficiently.

When your neighbour shares their drill and you lend them your lawn mower, that’s one less trip to Home Depot. That may not put out every fire we’re facing. But, as Ms. Horowitz writes in her book, “Profound change will come when we individually stop waiting and collectively start building.”

Nicolas Parent has learned firsthand that collective action can happen in quiet places, without a natural disaster to force people together.

Two years ago, he moved to Sainte-Cécile-de-Masham, a small village in Outaouias, Que. As he got to know his neighbours, they’d mention pitching in to pour a foundation or help someone with their new roof. At dinner parties, he’d hear about artisans exchanging pottery for plumbing help. On the community social media group, there were always multiple responses to requests for help.

Last summer, even though he has little construction experience, Dr. Parent and a group of local residents spent many Saturdays helping the expectant parents next door add a nursery to their home. And when the snow piled high on Dr. Parent’s roof, his neighbour helped shovel it off.

Mutual aid, Ms. Horowitz suggests, starts there, with one favour passed on, another returned – the manifestation of basic, instinctive human decency.

“It doesn’t have to be revolutionary,” she says. Invite your neighbours for dinner. Organize a food train for someone sick. Clean up your local park. Identify a small local problem – and work on the solution. “You’ll see, a million wonderful things will happen.”

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