Guiding Principles
1. This is not a charity, service organization, or social club. Mutual aid is when neighbors come together to meet or uplift each others needs because those who are in power aren't doing it. Mutual aid is a form of political resistance. We look out for each other because we don't have effective local support or city infrastructure to meet our community's needs.
2. We acknowledge how capitalism and other oppressions (ie: racism, classism, sexism, homophobia/transphobia, environmental injustice) rob us from being in right relationship with one another and the land. The issues we face are all interconnected. Our system wants us to compete against one another, fight for jobs, resources, and opportunities, rather than coordinate and work together. We reject individualism. We are working to transform the way we share our time, resources and skills for our collective benefit.
3. We acknowledge the ways in which our system makes it harder to nurture our minds, bodies, and spirits. We see this through the extraction of our labor, lack of gun control, the polluting of our waterways, our soil, and other sources of life, gentrification, reproductive control, among other oppressions. We are devoted to intergenerational, place-based healing. We work to transform the collective trauma we've experiened through this violent system, in order to sustain our ourselves and the wellbeing of our communities.
4. We strive to have our organizing work led by and for those that are disproportionately impacted by the issues we face as Kentuckians, which include BIPOC, women + femmes, LGBTQ+, low-income, the unhoused, the undocumented, those who are disabled/neurodivergent, those who were formerly incarcerated, and other marginalized groups.
5. We seek to build relationships in our community and with the land that are based on accountability, respect, compassion, solidarity, and kinship. The act of mutual aid alone will not save us.
6. We understand that mutual aid is an indigenous strategy that has long been used by BIPOC peoples throughout human history, and how it has been co-opted by the system to weaken community power and crimininalize communities who are anti-capitalistic.
7. The land that we are standing on was STOLEN from the Shawnee, Cherokee, and Yuchi tribes.