"Solidarity not Charity"
What Can We Do? #12
What Can We Do? is my free weekly newsletter covering case studies of collective organising from around the world.
“What we do, it comes from a place of love”, says Jasmine Araujo, founder of Southern Solidarity, which distributes food and other essentials to those in need in New Orleans.
Jasmine founded Southern Solidarity during the pandemic when she saw people throughout her community fall into poverty, with many losing their homes. Rather than giving in to hopelessness or despair, she stepped up.
“I saw the houseless weren’t really being considered during the pandemic, so I got a group of friends together to help. And it just kind of grew from there.”
The organisation started out by delivering meals and other essentials to houseless people in the local area.
“We bring clothes, medical supplies. We bring street medics and legal help. We bring digital devices so that folks can apply for phones and resources online.
“We help people move from the street to housing by providing them with a grant. And then we do micro grants for people who call us over the phone and say that they need food for their kids this week.”
Southern Solidarity focuses on building long-term relationships with the houseless people in their community. Volunteers recognise that they have more in common with those on the streets than the billionaire philanthropists that fund much charity work in the US.
“We are all together fighting this oppressive system. We don’t have a charity-based model where the volunteers often have a mentality of superiority over the people they’re helping. That’s not where we are coming from.”
Rather than a top-down charity model, the philosophy of Southern Solidarity rests on the idea of collective liberation. When people work together to support each other, they are stronger than when they’re engaged in a helper-victim dynamic.
“We believe we are all oppressed and we’re all working together to liberate ourselves and each other. Our volunteers have the same challenges as those they’re helping, with health, housing, and so we’re all together fighting this system as one.”
Jasmine isn’t just trying to distribute food. She sees her work in the tradition of the Black Panthers, who sought to build community power, providing political education and deepening solidarity among oppressed people.
“There’s a consciousness raising element to our group,” Jasmine told me.
“We have these weekly learning events where folks meet with people who are well versed in the black radical tradition – in black socialism, or abolition. They come to the community to teach us. We’re all constantly learning how to be in solidarity with each other.”
Jasmine knew that she had to build trust with the local community if she wanted to engage people in a political project. And this required building lasting relationships with those they were trying to support.
“When we first started, a lot of the folks we were trying to help would be angry at us. They would throw food back at us. Because obviously what they needed was so much more than food.
So, over time, we started to form relationships with them. They got to know our names, and the organisation, they started to trust us.”
This attitude of trust is central to how Jasmine chooses to run the organisation. She has total faith in the team she has put together, and this is reflected in the decentralised structure of the organisation.
“We are an open collective, which means that anytime a member fund raises, anytime we get a grant, our money is pooled. Then any member of the team can access those funds and just give a receipt.
“It’s been nice to just let go of control and see how everyone steps up to the plate in different ways. I’ve learned that I'm not the only one with skills. I can learn from other members, and we're all better when we work together.”
Beyond helpers and victims
Jasmine’s model of ‘solidarity not charity’ provides a model for left organisers everywhere. When those who see themselves as ‘helpers’ approach those they see as ‘victims’ with an attitude of compassion mixed with condescension, they can end up exacerbating the problems they’re trying to tackle.
Those cast in the role of ‘victim’ end up feeling helpless and disempowered, which makes it harder to tackle the problems that pushed them into poverty in the first place. These feelings of disempowerment make it much less likely that these people will see themselves as agents of political change, capable of organising with others to fight for a better world.
Meanwhile, those who see themselves as ‘helpers’ tend to take all the world’s problems on their own shoulders. They end up suffering with resentment and burnout, and many end up leaving the movement before long. What’s more, this attitude tends to come alongside attempts to centralise control, which can make these organisations quite brittle and hierarchical.
The ‘solidarity not charity’ model helps to overcome all these issues. No one is the ‘victim’ and no one is the ‘helper’; instead, everyone is working together to support each other.
Southern Solidarity epitomises this approach. Jasmine and her team approach those they support not only with kindness and compassion, but with an unflinching commitment to transforming the social systems that have created the injustice of homelessness in the first place.
Solidarity means standing alongside those around you to fight for your shared interests. It means treating those you encounter at work and in the community with respect and care, so that you can build bonds that allow you to support and protect each other when times get tough.
In short, it means getting over our cynicism and despair, and starting the work of building a better future together.
If you want to get involved with Southern Solidarity, or support their work, go to https://southernsolidarity.org/
I sincerely appreciate Grace’s critique of the so-called charity in the capitalist world.I still vividly remember years ago,Grace has ever criticized Bill Gates who wears the mask of philanthropy.It’s quite necessary,because the mainstream ideology controlled by the ruling elite has so successfully maneuvered ordinary people’s mind,it’s quite hard to make progressive social changes without emancipating people’s mind from the ideological enslavement like the concept of charity.Charity is a depoliticized concept,by donating to their own funds established by the robber barons,they successfully evade their huge amounts of taxes,in addition,this ostensibly generous and compassionate behavior enslaves and colonializes people’s mind.
Grace’s mobilizing and revolutionary writings always emphasize the collective and grassroots actions with the perspective from the bottom up,and delegitimize the atomized individualism.Only by standing together and fighting for our collective rights can we realize our common good and realize our collective future with dignity.
Instead of alleviating social miseries,charity may reproduce and exacerbate the existing social illnesses and neocolonial model of development.People need to wake up from the deceptive ideology of charity.By glorifying the achievements of charity,people begin to idolize billionaires and help them accumulate their wealth.It’s actually the worship and deepening of private ownership which is the root cause of social polarization.
The unequaled fighter Noam Chomsky stops talking about 2 years ago due to his frail health,the prominent Marxian thinker David Harvey currently is too old to write due to his old age,the humanitarian luminary Amartya Sen is also too vulnerable to have any new intellectual output,but our dear Grace brilliantly and enthusiastically keeps lecturing,talking and writing which can constitute a great intellectual challenge to the hegemonic ideology of the neoimperial age and serve as a torchlight to help people pursue a more dignified and hopeful life.
This a wonderful example of community building and its continued success and growth is inspiring. As a model to follow it would be really interesting to understand the way in which people were recruited to roll this out and how it was funded.