In hard times, we tell a common story. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Tighten your belt. Sacrifice for the greater good. We hear it again right now—as military conflict abroad, economic anxiety at home, and a federal government actively dismantling the safety nets millions of Americans depend on converge into something that feels, for many people, like a slow emergency with no clear end.
Here is what that story always leaves out: we have never, in our entire history, actually done this alone.
Whenever official institutions are unavailable, fail, or move too slowly, too bureaucratically, or too indifferently, people turn to each other. They share food, money, labor, and care through informal networks built on trust rather than eligibility requirements, on solidarity rather than charity.
This practice has a name. It is called mutual aid. And in this particular American moment, it may be the most important thing we are not talking about.
Mutual aid: a practice as old as the republic
When Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in the United States in 1831, he was astonished by one thing above all else: the instinct of ordinary Americans to organize. In Democracy in America, originally published in 1835, he observed that when a challenge arose—a road to build, a neighbor in need, a community threatened—Americans did not wait for government. They formed associations. They acted together. He saw this not as a quaint cultural habit but as the structural foundation of American democracy itself.
What Tocqueville was describing—that instinct to organize horizontally, without waiting for authority—is the same spirit that has animated mutual aid throughout American history. Mutual aid is as old as humanity itself, and its American story is rooted not in privilege, but in survival. During the period of American slavery, enslaved people built covert networks to share food and protect one another. In Reconstruction, freed Black Americans formed mutual aid societies to provide healthcare and education. In the Civil Rights Movement, organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) ensured activists had food, shelter, and legal support. The Black Panthers ran free breakfast programs and health clinics, not as charity, but as a direct response to a system that had abandoned their communities.
The pattern is consistent: when official response fails, communities take care of their own. This is not a backup plan. It is a foundational feature of American civic life.
The importance of mutual aid right now
The COVID pandemic triggered an unprecedented surge of mutual aid activity in modern American history. By May 2020, researchers estimated over 800 mutual aid networks were operating nationwide—up from fewer than 100 before the pandemic. Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy Strong raised $1.2 million in direct community aid, supporting neighbors facing financial hardship during the global pandemic. Austin Mutual Aid raised nearly $3 million through GoFundMe and Venmo during the 2021 Texas winter storm to place thousands of unhoused Texans in hotel rooms, while the state was still figuring out who was responsible. After the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, mutual aid networks were distributing supplies and coordinating evacuations.
A survey by the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy found that 68% of pandemic-era charitable giving bypassed the 501(c)(3) nonprofit framework entirely—flowing instead through informal networks, digital platforms, and mutual aid. This suggests that during the most significant philanthropic moment of the last century, the majority of American generosity moved through channels the law does not formally recognize, protect, or incentivize.
The bootstrap contradiction
Here is the part that should make you angry.
The American government tells the same old story in a crisis: you are on your own. Be resilient. Do not wait for someone else. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. And yet, when Americans actually do this—when they pool money to keep neighbors housed, send emergency funds through Venmo (or other platforms) to families in crisis, organize food distribution in their communities—the law treats them like tax cheats.
Under the current federal tax code, monetary mutual aid transactions fall into a legal gray zone that often punishes those being helped. The Internal Revenue Code’s definition of a “gift” requires transfers to be made out of what courts have called “detached and disinterested generosity”—a standard almost impossible to meet when your donation moved through GoFundMe to a neighborhood fund managed by someone you have never met. The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 made this worse, lowering the 1099-K reporting threshold for payment platforms from $20,000 to just $600. A person who received $600 in emergency rent assistance through Venmo from their community’s mutual aid fund may now receive a tax form treating that help as income. Emergency aid that kept a family in their home becomes a tax liability the following April. A provision in the sweeping tax-and-spending package President Donald Trump signed into law on July 4, 2025, restored that threshold to $20,000, a welcome but fragile reprieve. But the underlying problem remains: mutual aid has no permanent, formal protection in federal tax law, leaving communities dependent on the political winds to determine whether helping a neighbor counts as income.
The people who give mutual aid get no deduction. The people who received may owe money to either the federal government or their state of residence, or both. Research confirms that tax incentives powerfully shape giving—every $1 in tax benefits generates roughly $1.30 in additional charitable donations. The law shapes generosity. Right now, it is shaping it away from the people who need it most.
And sometimes this goes further than taxes. In Houston, Texas, members of Food Not Bombs were arrested for distributing free food to homeless people without a city permit. And in 2014, a 90-year-old war veteran was arrested in Fort Lauderdale, Florida for feeding the unhoused in public. We tell people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and then arrest them for distributing boots.
What needs to change
The fix does not require building a new bureaucracy or forcing mutual aid networks to become nonprofits against their will, which would undermine the very horizontal, community-driven character that makes mutual aid work. It requires something more targeted: a defined exclusion from gross income for mutual aid transfers up to a meaningful threshold, a safe harbor for community organizations to self-certify their activities, and clear IRS guidance that platform-mediated giving can qualify as non-taxable when the context is clearly communal and non-commercial.
Congress has done this before. IRC code 139 provides tax-free disaster relief for payments made in connection with qualified disasters. The logic and legal architecture already exist—they simply have not been applied to the ongoing, everyday disasters of poverty, housing insecurity, and community need that mutual aid networks address every single day.
Tocqueville saw, nearly two centuries ago, that America’s strength lived in its people’s willingness to take care of one another. Every war, every crisis, every moment of institutional failure has proven him right. The communities that practiced mutual aid through centuries of slavery, displacement, and systemic abandonment did not wait for permission. Neither will the ones organizing today.
The least we can do is stop penalizing them for it.
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