Polgreen: Support mutual aid groups closest to those in need

By Lydia Polgreen / The New York Times

In 1980, when I was 4 years old, my family moved to Kenya. My father studied agricultural engineering in graduate school and had long dreamed of working in Africa, hoping to help subsistence farmers improve their lives. His work with organizations like the U.S. Agency for International Development, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Bank took him across Africa. I was raised believing that investment in development and international cooperation improved ordinary people’s lives.

My years as a foreign correspondent in Africa and Asia taught me to be skeptical of these childhood convictions. I saw firsthand how institutions of the kind my father worked for sometimes reinforced old hierarchies and systems of extraction and exploitation. These days, with wealthy nations sharply reducing their spending on aid to the poorest countries — in the case of the United States, almost entirely eliminating it — the possibility of making strides against the grave problems bedeviling the world’s poorest people seems quite small indeed.

And yet the need is bottomless. Look across the globe and see suffering all around us. Conflicts in places I first wrote about two decades ago — Congo, Sudan, Haiti and more — continue to kill, maim and starve civilians. Climate disasters rob people of their homes and devastate their farms and businesses. Easily preventable and treatable diseases like malaria, cholera and AIDS kill or disable millions. In America, the richest nation in the history of the world, children go hungry and are homeless.

So what is to be done? I hope that someday soon, we will invest in systemic solutions to these problems. But until then, I have found myself increasingly convinced that the best way to help people facing catastrophe is to support local organizations working closest to them on the ground; and, whenever possible, give those people money directly.

There is an organization called GiveDirectly that does exactly that: It puts donated cash into the hands of needy people. In war-scarred eastern Congo, it provides money to help make sure children are fed, clothed and can go to school; in nations like Malawi, Liberia and Mozambique, it has facilitated direct cash transfers to some of the poorest people in the world. It also helps Americans. It raised funds for families that lost SNAP benefits during the government shutdown, for example.

Yet in the most dire humanitarian crises, cash is often of little use. In those places, local organizations — often working in concert with the United Nations and nongovernmental organizations — are best placed to provide essential lifesaving support. I have been awed by the work of Emergency Response Rooms in Sudan, networks of volunteers that set up communal kitchens, help people flee to safety and rebuild critical infrastructure destroyed in the country’s devastating civil war. You can donate to these volunteers through the Mutual Aid Sudan Coalition.

Mutual aid is a very old idea, rooted in solidarity rather than charity. It came into mainstream consciousness during the pandemic, when so many people across the globe found themselves needing help of all kinds. Community fridges popped up in neighborhoods around the country, as well as groups to help with transportation, health care, child care and schooling when everything shut down. It is built on the idea of equality — neighbors helping neighbors for the benefit of the entire community.

So my final recommendation is this: Find a mutual aid group working in your community, or in a community you want to support, and offer your time, expertise and resources, not as charity but as an investment in building a more just and equitable world for everyone. The organization GlobalGiving has a database that includes more than 1,000 of them around the world. Or find a group working in your own community, and if there isn’t one, why not start one?

Mutual aid is in many ways the antithesis of the kind of thinking about global development that defined my father’s career. Indeed, he left that work with some disillusionment. I’d like to think, like me, he would find in mutual aid’s reemergence the seeds of something better and more humane that could lift us all.

This article is part of Times Opinion’s Giving Guide 2025. The author has no direct connection to the organizations mentioned. If you are interested in any organization mentioned in the guide, please go directly to its website. Neither the authors nor the Times will be able to address queries about the groups or facilitate donations.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2025.