The US government failed the pandemic test. Now it's up to Americans to take care of each other.

• Federal leadership failed to provide for frontline workers and citizens alike during the early months of the pandemic.
• In their place, mutual aid efforts proliferated out of need.
• Without a radical change in government response to crisis, Americans will have to rely on each other.
• Reina Sultan is a Lebanese-American and Muslim freelance journalist, as well as a contributing opinion writer for Insider.
• This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.

Despite millions losing their jobs and hundreds of thousands dying from COVID-19, it was individuals and community-run mutual aid groups stepping up to help -not the government.

The classic mutual aid slogan "we keep us safe" was never more true than during the height of the pandemic, and this type of work will continue to keep marginalized people safe as we enter a new phase of economic and public health uncertainty, all fueled by deliberate government negligence. As the world opens up again and new crises emerge, it's clear that the need for people to help each other through challenging emergencies has not dissipated, but grown.

This type of mobilization to meet urgent needs is not charity. Instead, mutual aid is revolutionary survival work done by volunteers or community members to fill specific needs.

According to Dean Spade, an organizer and professor who wrote the book Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (And the Next), mutual aid is inherently anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, prioritizing racial justice, disability justice, and gender justice. Mutual aid is direct action, whereby people can access what they need directly, without conditions or loopholes. To engage in mutual aid, one must also engage in political education and in the disruption of the root causes of distress.

Tricia Pendergrast, second-year medical student at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine working with GetMePPEChicago, got involved in mutual aid efforts when she began hearing the horror stories of healthcare workers using PPE until it physically fell off, or using garbage bags in lieu of actual gowns. She and her peers wondered if someone was going to do something to help. When no one did, they stepped up themselves.

"The beginning of our work is quite incredible to reflect on. We recruited hundreds of volunteers to call every business in every industry that could possibly use PPE in the city of Chicago and the surrounding suburbs and beg them to donate PPE to us," she recalls. Once they got a hit, they'd drive around the city picking up boxes of gloves of five or 10 N95 masks and meet in a parking lot to assemble donations. Then, they'd head to the houses of physicians who could sneak the PPE into the hospital later that day.

While Tricia and her peers did this daily, government officials at best neglected to help, and at worst, lied about the reality and depth of PPE issues.

"Most of the nursing homes we talk to reported receiving no PPE from the federal government during the Trump administration," she says, "One reported, and I quote, 'a bag full of shower caps. Melted together.'

During the protests in the summer of 2020, Tricia also worked as a protest medic in the evenings after spending all day bringing PPE to healthcare workers. She says she did this so healthcare workers "didn't have to wear dirty masks and trash bags during a pandemic," but she remains haunted after seeing the "millions of dollars of riot gear worn by the police at night."

Mutual organizing

In Brooklyn, Caren Holmes organized with other abolitionists upon realizing "the deadly potential of the virus in jails, prisons and detention centers" where social distancing is impossible and medical care is abysmal even outside of the pandemic. She and others "developed campaigns for mass release, organized phone banks, social media storms, and demonstrations to pressure elected [officials] and facilities to release people and provide those inside with access to hygienic supplies, masks and medical care."

As jail populations in NYC rose throughout the summer and the uprisings against police violence, Caren, like many, supported bailout efforts happening across the country.

"In this system, paying bail is an essential survival practice to keep our communities out of jails where social distancing and CDC pandemic guidelines are an absolute impossibility," she says. However, because of the sheer number of people who are incarcerated and the refusal of the state to treat them like human beings, the scope of their needs are often impossible to meet just through mutual aid.

"We know now just how deadly the pandemic would become in jails, prisons and detention centers," says Caren, "But the need for massive wealth redistribution has never been more apparent and our mutual aid campaigns are only a drop in the bucket." That's why it's hard to understate the degree of abandonment by the state. The state's failures resulted in over half a million people dying, and many of those deaths could have been prevented.

Rachael Lorenzo manages the Indigenous Women Rising abortion fund, helping pregnant people seeking abortions across the country. Once the pandemic began, she says "we took that experience we have in abortion funding and saw there is a place for what Indigenous Women Rising does in mutual aid."

She and her organization launched a COVID-19 package form that got more than 4,000 applicants in just 24 hours. "We saw people needed help with things beyond food," Rachael says, "They needed diapers, menstrual hygiene products, sexual health products like condoms and lube, breastfeeding supplies, and anything to help pregnant people prepare for birth later in 2020."

The late 2020 cuts to the post office budget were challenging for the folks at Indigenous Women Rising because recipients of care packages weren't receiving their mail in time, especially people who lived in rural areas. Despite this, they reached a lot of people, also corresponding with their relatives in Canada to deliver mutual aid as needed.

B, a 35-year-old Los Angeles community organizer and healer, says that she and other organizers identified needs and gaps as the pandemic progressed and immediately moved to action. What started as a mutual aid effort to get money into the hands of people who needed it, eventually transformed to include securing vaccine access for BIPOC in LA.

"BIPOC are historically and currently locked out of access to healthcare, continuously abused, not listened to, and experiencing racism," says B, "We don't focus on white people because systems, particularly healthcare systems, already cater to them and they are well aware of how to game the system if needed."

The state was directly adversarial to this work. B recalls that community health workers she works with - both women of color - were turned away from vaccine sites after receiving LA Department of Health grants to secure vaccines for community members. Workers who were receiving state funds to schedule marginalized folks for vaccines were not able to get vaccinated themselves, as healthcare workers. She cautions against calling this a government failure. She says, "that implies that it was accidental. It is most certainly not."

None of this should have been necessary as the government had and continues to have the resources to help people during this prolonged pandemic. Despite this, it's clear that politicians are not mobilizing to help people who need it. Just this week, the eviction moratorium expired, leaving hundreds of thousands on the precipice of homelessness.

Without government assistance, folks will rely on community networks to support them in finding new housing, securing food for themselves and their families, and accessing healthcare. Sharifa Khan, Co-Founder of Southside Action Pact, says "I see mutual aid as the only option to filling these gaps of aid from our government because it does not exist in consideration of our country's structure." She sees mutual aid as integral in continuing to get people's needs met because "it's the only practice that provides empathy to communities that are overlooked and underfunded especially at a time like this."

It has been heartening to watch organizers get together to fill the gaps to ensure that people have what they need during an already trying time. It's proven what mutual aid practitioners have always known: We do keep us safe and will continue to do so, without the help of a violent, colonial state.

"Mutual aid nurtures the kinds of communities that can and will fight for each other - and those are needed in this country more than ever," says Craig, an organizer with FromTheHeartPNW in Seattle. "Everything in the United States today seems expertly-designed to increase our alienation and atomization - even the pandemic itself." Because of this, it will be necessary for mutual aid workers to continue to build and strengthen these new networks and communities as the Delta variant spreads, evictions resume, and climate disasters worsen.

As B says, "For many, mutual aid is a new concept, but for others mutual aid is a way of life, a way of surviving, a way of existing. It is not a fad, or a hobby, or even something you volunteer for. It is a philosophy and ethic of moving that is in the right relationship with others and the world." Unless federal officials step up to help, this is the way things will be.