The Reading List & Toolkit Library

The books, toolkits and evidence this network is built from — with what each one taught us.

2026-08-14 · The operator's order: "identify books, guides and more resources." Organized for three readers: the neighbour who wants one book, the organizer who wants the toolkit shelf, the builder who wants the tool stack. Live-checked items are marked ✓fetched (today); the rest are search-verified titles. WP-READ integration: the starred (★) core belongs in the movement's public reading list.

1. The books — a canon in reading order

The five to start with (★ core):

1. ★ **Dean Spade — *Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)*** (Verso,

2020). The operating manual: solidarity vs charity, no eligibility tests, group-process failure modes and how to survive them. If the network reads one book, it's this. Verso

1. ★ **Rebecca Solnit — *A Paradise Built in Hell*** (Viking, 2009). The evidence that disaster

communities default to altruism, not panic — the book that pre-explains Altadena 2025. overview

1. ★ **Peter Kropotkin — *Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution*** (1902; free everywhere). The

source text: cooperation as a driver of survival, from animals to medieval guilds. Read the modern illustrated edition (PM Press) if the original's density stalls you.

1. ★ **Mariame Kaba & Kelly Hayes — *Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of

Reciprocal Care*** (Haymarket, 2023). The sustainability book: how organizers last. Pairs with Kaba's We Do This 'Til We Free Us (2021).

1. ★ **scott crow — *Black Flags and Windmills*** (PM Press, 2nd ed.). The Common Ground

Collective/Katrina memoir — what building "solidarity not charity" at disaster scale actually costs. PM Press

The deeper shelf:

1. **Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha — *Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice*** (Arsenal Pulp,

2018) — care as political practice; the origin milieu of "care webs" and pods.

1. **Jessica Gordon Nembhard — *Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative

Economic Thought and Practice*** (Penn State, 2014) — the co-op/mutual-aid lineage the Panthers drew on; corrective to any "mutual aid started in 2020" framing.

1. **The Care Collective — *The Care Manifesto*** (Verso, 2020) — care as organizing principle

for institutions, not only neighbours.

1. **Marina Sitrin & Colectiva Sembrar (eds.) — *Pandemic Solidarity*** (Pluto, 2020) —

first-person COVID mutual aid from ~20 countries; the global wave in its own words.

1. **Shira Hassan — *Saving Our Own Lives: Liberatory Harm Reduction*** (Haymarket, 2022) —

the harm-reduction discipline our outreach lane borrows from.

1. **adrienne maree brown — *Emergent Strategy*** (AK Press, 2017) — decentralized growth

patterns; why small-and-replicating beats big-and-central (our cells doctrine).

1. **Elinor Ostrom — *Governing the Commons*** (1990) — already worked in our library

(our internal record); the governance science under commons stewardship.

1. **Regan de Loggans — *Let's Talk Mutual Aid*** (zine, free PDF) — the 20-minute Indigenous-

authored primer; hand it out at Hub Hour.

1. Jia Tolentino — "What Mutual Aid Can Do During a Pandemic" (New Yorker, 2020) — still the

best single magazine explainer for a general reader.

1. Historical grounding: the Black Panther Party's survival programs (free breakfast,

clinics, ambulance) — start with mutualaid.coop's history section and the CLDC's twenty-years retrospective; Canadian side: friendly societies, Antigonish movement, caisses populaires — R1 extends.

2. Guides & toolkits — the organizer shelf

• ✓fetched Big Door Brigade — Mutual Aid Toolbox (bigdoorbrigade.com) —

Dean Spade's reference library: forming groups, food distribution, housing, legal support, and the only good "Handling Money and Taxes" series for mutual aid anywhere (fiscal sponsorship, 1099-K/Venmo traps — US-law flavoured, our team writes the Canadian equivalent). Site live today; low-churn reference (last posts 2022) — treat as canon, not news.

• Mutual Aid 101: #WeGotOurBlock (Kaba × Ocasio-Cortez, 2020) — the classic start-a-pod

workbook; archived PDF hosted by MADR: toolkit

• Shareable — Mutual Aid 101 program (shareable.net/mutual-aid-101) —

the CURRENT one: training series launched spring 2025 (thousands attended) + evolving toolkit. Our best external sync partner for facilitator training on a two-week clock.

• Mutual Aid Disaster Relief — workshops + lessons (mutualaiddisasterrelief.org) —

the Common-Ground-lineage disaster network; their "Lessons from grassroots organizing" curriculum is the crisis-surge playbook.

• Mutual Aid NYC — group_resources (GitHub) —

the open operational repo: intake scripts, dispatch workflows, data hygiene. Closest thing to our own estate's style anywhere in the movement.

• Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective — Pod Mapping worksheet (Mia Mingus) — the

personal-network mapping tool; our Block Circle kit's onboarding exercise. (Search "BATJC pod mapping" — hosted on batjc.wordpress.com.)

• Colorado Rapid Response Network — Best Practices for Signal Groups & Local Organizing

(updated Feb 2026): PDF — current, concrete, matches our Signal-protected-lane design.

• EFF Surveillance Self-Defense — Creating and Managing Signal Groups

(ssd.eff.org) — the security baseline for the outreach lane.

• Commons Social Change Library — Mutual Aid collection

(commonslibrary.org) — 1,500+ organizing resources, the Australian aggregation layer; mine it in R1 for anything this list missed.

• Mobilizing Mutual Aid: A Toolkit for Community Resource Exchange (UNC, 2021):

PDF — academic-grade design patterns for request/offer exchanges.

• The estate's own kit layer (already built, already ours):

Block Circle Starter · Citizens’ Assembly in a Box · Complaint Clinic.

3. Evidence & case studies — the research shelf

• UK COVID literature (the sustainability science):

National Preparedness Commission — Sustaining Covid Mutual Aid Groups · Frontiers in Psychology — More Than a COVID-19 Response · Drury group case study · wellbeing effects study · neighbourhood-led groups study

• Occupy Sandy — the scale proof: DHS-funded study The Resilient Social Network (HSSAI,

2013) — 60,000 volunteers mobilized, out-performing legacy relief; Truthout on the study · Resilience retrospective

• Common Ground Collective — the movement-lineage proof:

Wikipedia · Waging Nonviolence

• Caremongering (Toronto's own contribution to the literature):

PLOS ONE study · The Conversation post-mortem

• The estate's purok flagship + its 8 multi-model critiques

(our internal record) — nothing external matches this for Toronto-specific depth; R1 absorbs it into the published pack.

4. Platforms & tools — the builder shelf

← BEY Mutual Aid