What Mutual Aid Gets Right: Practices Nonprofits Need Now

Healing Equity Unitedis a collaborative partnership between Fiona Oliphant and Jessica Ayden Li. Healing Equity United is a 100% womxn of color (Black and Asian) owned. Our mission is to foster equity, diversity, and inclusivity by compelling individuals to examine their own power and privilege. We move them from awareness to action, ultimately realigning resources, dismantling systems of oppression, and healing communities. Visit our website to learn more about our work: www.healingequitynited.com

Healing Equity United

Creating systems of community care within our organizations when government safety nets are dismantled.

While many nonprofits have struggled with collaboration, decision-making, and burnout during this extended period of crisis, mutual aid networks have been operating differently—often with fewer resources, no formal hierarchy, and deeper community accountability.Mutual aid organizing is rooted in principles that challenge how traditional nonprofits function: shared decision-making instead of top-down authority, collective care instead of individualized burnout, and conflict as something to work through rather than avoid. These aren't just ideals—they're practiced methods that have sustained grassroots movements through some of the hardest moments in recent history.This strategy session explores what nonprofits can learn from mutual aid practices, drawing wisdom from <a href="https://www.deanspade.net/mutual-aid-building-solidarity-during-this-crisis-and-the-next/" title="https://www.deanspade.net/mutual-aid-building-solidarity-during-this-crisis-and-the-next/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Dean Spade's Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (And The Next)</a>. We're not here to romanticize grassroots organizing or abandon organizational structure, but to examine where nonprofit culture has calcified around hierarchy, conflict avoidance, and unsustainable work patterns that mutual aid models directly challenge.Whether your organization is highly hierarchical or experimenting with flatter structures, mutual aid offers tested frameworks for working in groups, making decisions collectively, preventing and addressing conflict constructively, and building cultures of care that actually prevent burnout rather than just responding to it.What we'll explore together:<ul><li>How mutual aid networks approach group work and shared labor—and what that reveals about nonprofit assumptions around roles, ownership, and control</li><li>Decision-making models from mutual aid organizing: consensus, the advice-process, and when hierarchy might actually be necessary</li><li>How mutual aid communities prevent and address conflict without HR departments, formal policies, or avoidance</li><li>What mutual aid teaches us about sustainability, collective care, and addressing burnout structurally rather than individually</li><li>The limits and challenges of mutual aid models—and how to adapt practices thoughtfully rather than appropriating them</li></ul>What you'll leave with:<ul><li>A clearer understanding of how mutual aid organizing operates and what makes it distinct from traditional nonprofit models</li><li>Frameworks and practices for more collaborative decision-making that you can adapt to your organizational context</li><li>Approaches to conflict that center relationships and accountability rather than avoidance or punishment</li><li>Ideas for addressing burnout collectively rather than treating it as an individual problem</li><li>For those who attend live, guiding questions and tools to assess where your organization might benefit from mutual aid principles</li></ul>Who this is for:<ul><li>Executive Directors, CEOs, and senior leaders questioning traditional nonprofit hierarchies and seeking more collaborative models</li><li>Program and operations leaders responsible for team culture, decision-making processes, and staff wellbeing</li><li>Board members and governance leaders interested in alternative organizational structures and practices</li><li>Anyone working in or alongside mutual aid networks who wants to bring those lessons into formal nonprofit spaces</li><li>Leaders committed to building organizations that center collective care, shared power, and sustainable practice</li></ul>

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What Mutual Aid Gets Right: Practices Nonprofits Need Now

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What Mutual Aid Gets Right: Practices Nonprofits Need Now

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