Mutual aid as a business model

Waking Giants owner Sera Bonds shares how mutual aid compares with traditional charity and how Waking Giants builds it into the way they do business

I’m experimenting with a different way of doing business. I am building a company, Waking Giants, rooted in mutual aid as a foundational, economic and cultural part of its business model.

We bill ourselves as a social impact company supporting our clients, both for-profit and not-for-profit, to scale their impact. We do this through close collaborations in grant writing, technical writing, donor/sales data analysis and strategy, board training, executive coaching, media campaign support, and event production.

Is a mutual aid business model less harmful than a nonprofit or capitalist model? I don’t know. This is an experiment. I mean, it all is, really.

Writing this piece is scary, because I don’t want to position myself as an economic or business expert.¹ I’m lonely in this work, and I’m hopeful that, by opening up here with what we’re trying to do, I will find other business leaders trying to center liberation in their work while building and scaling “successful” businesses. I do not mean to imply that I started this movement, only to say that I’m looking for others to be in community with as part of this structural and social change.

I started my career in the NGO and philanthropic sectors and worked there for the better part of 20 years in as many countries. I experienced first hand the attempt to course-correct one’s social, economic and consumptive moral sins through philanthropy and humanitarian organizations. I witnessed this in both government and individual expressions of massive scale programs funded by USAID on one end of a continuum and individual donors looking for work to invest in that aligned with their values on the other.

I, too, have been complicit in the colonialism that these models of “doing good” are rooted in. I’ve opted out of those models over the last several years and am trying to engage differently with my role as a social impact business owner and do my own repair to the harm I participated in. I am deeply committed to understanding my role. As a Queer, middle aged, white, pro-Palestinian Jew who is an able bodied, mid-level professional with a master’s degree, I increasingly see my role both in business and in activism as a mover of resources. I see my role as a synthesizer of information, needs and social systems. What I love about how I get to work and how I engage with mutual aid is that my days are organized around my relationships. These relationships are rooted in trust and safety with both our collaborators and my team, especially as our day-to-day work in 2025 increasingly focuses on caring for our clients and team as they put out fires that are lit anew each day.

“Funding has fragmented solidarity in ways that repression never could.” — Arundhati Roy, Activist and Scholar

I’ve come to believe traditional models of giving rely on a system of hierarchical bureaucracy that dilutes potential positive impact. Mutual aid is by definition smaller scale than other systems of material exchange. There are pros and cons to this, most of which we don’t stand much of a chance at changing as individuals with no access to large, private sources of funding. We do, however, get to choose what we do with our businesses, and that’s where I put my efforts.

What mutual aid is

• Community led actions based in the understanding that we’re all going to need care someday.

• Material action as a way to be in solidarity rooted in relational community care where priorities and needs are identified by the community members who are most impacted by systems of harm.

• Old, not new or innovative.

• Based on systems of care from our natural world.

• Relational and not transactional.

Mutual aid, as both a theory and practice by that name, was coined by Russian anarchist (ha, ironic) Peter Kropotkin over 100 years ago. Kropotkin was a zoologist by training and offered mutual aid as an example of how social systems within the animal kingdom evolve. Mutual aid, as he saw it, was a social practice that was evolving.

Mutual aid has taken many forms in countless countries and cultures. In Chiapas, the Mayan-based Zapatista uprising of 1994 ushered in nearly 30 years of self-determination and self-government rooted in mutual aid practice. As Global Social Theory explains:

“The Zapatistas have focused their efforts on living a peaceful life of decolonial, anti-capitalist, collective resistance, concentrated upon recuperating land, mutual aid and exercising autonomy. The Zapatistas achieve this by centering their Indigenous traditions and the practice of horizontal governance, equitable gender relations, anti-systemic health care, grassroots education and agro-ecological food sovereignty.”

It shouldn’t surprise us that the folks who were on this land first, living in community with each other and nature, can teach the rest of us how to do this.

Mutual aid had a real moment during the first years of COVID when humanity had the experience of people feeling equally at risk. We know that isn’t actually how public health works, but in the early days of COVID, before there was a vaccination and before we understood its routes of transmission, everyone was scared in similar and shared ways. Mutual aid became more widely common both as an organizing strategy and a way to move resources.

Social care is our responsibility, not just the duty of the government or nonprofits. It is our responsibility as participants in capitalism as business owners and consumers to truly see where and when we could be more care-full. Reclaiming the joy to be found in caring for one another after many decades of class-based outsourcing of social support is one way in which mutual aid is taking up more space as a movement.

Marginalized communities, historically, have had to rely on each other in ways that well-resourced white communities have not had to. They know the government isn’t coming to save them. In fact, the white middle and upper class have often been encouraged to keep their need for help secret. That not only harms them but also denies community members an opportunity to experience the joy in providing community care.

What mutual aid is not

• Competitive

• Harmful

• Forceful

• Transactional

• Dominating

• Top down

• Charity

• New or innovative

• A replacement for protest

Mutual aid is not charity, it’s care.

Charitable giving as a philanthropic system comes from a sense of perceived moral and social superiority. For example, during white America’s first Gilded Age, the desire of the world’s wealthiest people to legitimize their ever-growing pots of gold conjured quite a performance of conspicuous giving. Industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie’s 1889 essay “The Gospel of Wealth” remains one of modern white philanthropy’s most cherished founding documents. The essay begins with a sweeping defense of wealth inequality. Spoiler: It doesn’t get much better from there.

I don’t suspect it’s a coincidence that 20 years after Carnegie’s essay Congress passed a series of laws that created the modern income tax system, exempting “any corporation or association organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable or educational purposes” from taxation. As we head toward the end of 2025, foundations needn’t have a website, a physical office or even a phone number, nor must they reveal their donors or giving strategies. They need only file an informational income tax return with the IRS, adhere (without much oversight) to basic rules against “self-dealing,” and expend 5% of their assets annually for charitable purposes — including overhead. And here we are.

On a separate but related subject, as a community organizing strategy, mutual aid is not meant to replace protesting. It is its own form of relational and economic resistance. We need to show up in as many different ways, facets, iterations towards liberation for all that we can.

Mutual aid as a business model

Mutual aid as a business model at Waking Giants looks like:

• Reorganizing human labor to sustain each other and the social change we want to see.

• Recognition that capitalism and supremacy are most successful when we feel isolated and embody a value system rooted in the idea that there isn’t enough to go around.

• Challenging traditional workplace cultural values that assume someone has a “‘wife” at home to do all of the adulting required of modern life, letting workers put all of their energy into productivity for a company’s profits.

• Taking the focus away from the American ideal of exceptionalism of any one individual and replacing it with a value system that centers relationship and care for all over the value of one individual’s worth or contribution.

I get to, as a business owner, reimagine a place where every person who interacts with my company experiences care. I’m not succeeding at this across the board. I’m listening when I fail and doing my best to do as little harm as I can and repair harm when I cause it.

We’re also reimagining the structural ways material resources flow. For example, the concept of debt changes when it’s familial or community based as compared to being top down from a financial institution. As a result of reading this newsletter, I am learning to challenge my own ideas of carrying business debt.

I’ve taken out a line of credit that enables me, to carry less stress about paying our team when our clients are late in making payments. We are all humans out here trying to do our best. I want to be able to extend grace periods to our clients and pay our team on time. This expansive and not at all socially punitive framework of debt (thanks Dana) is helping me to be a more generous collaborator.

Where’s the mutuality in this business model?

We’ll all be in need of care and support one day, so this river of mutual aid flows both ways.

We do our best to be in a relationship with the folks and actions we support and frame our exchanges as symbiotic. That is part of its design.

I experienced this symbiosis recently when I had spinal surgery and needed care, meals and help around our house. My community poured patience and care into me, my family and our Waking Giants team while I recovered. Generosity that flows in all directions — that is what I dream of as an outcome of this kind of business model.

Here are some ways I actually do this as a business owner:

• We allocate profits from our consulting services to fund individual mutual aid actions that align with our values. In the last year, that’s included helping to pay the tuition for a Gazan medical student in Egypt, and giving cash to women living in a domestic violence shelter in a community impacted by some recent terrible flooding.

• I pay the taxes on the mutual aid funds that flow through our company so tax incentives aren’t what motivates our giving.

• Events we host have a mutual aid component where a portion of sales goes to support a mutual aid action related to the focus of event.

• We offer unlimited PTO for our team, many of whom are BIPOC and/or LGBTQ+ in America (which is in and of itself a stressful daily situation in 2025).

• Flextime is a norm so our team can work when it’s best for them.

• Community care is an intimate and required element of our workplace culture.

• Skill and knowledge sharing are foundational to how we work, to eliminate gatekeeping.

• We invest time in relationships and prioritize listening.

• We leverage our company’s microphones to ensure that we are not the story when we amplify our clients or mutual aid actions.

• We foster community by hosting gatherings as mutual aid opportunities, such as inviting our business and client community to cook together to stock free fridges in Austin and pack supplies for flood-impacted households not included in mainstream disaster responses.

How you can support mutual aid

• Give directly. So-called micro donors,” who donate less than $100, make up the majority of nonprofit donors, according to a recent report from the Fundraising Effectiveness Project. Imagine the power we could communicate as folks who “give” in this range if we allocated those funds toward mutual aid actions and not toward “charitable” organizations. The tax write-off isn’t going to make a big difference, so why not give more directly?

• When a war or disaster strikes that opens your heart, I invite you to resist donating to a large, multinational NGO and instead take an extra two minutes to google “mutual aid XXXX” and give that way. For example, show a Palestinian family that you care by finding a mutual aid campaign, and give your funds directly to a Gazan family or Gazan student studying abroad through Operation Olive Branch.

• Pay for your media. I know, what a wild idea, and how is this connected to mutual aid? Well, lots of media outlets need your financial support so they can tell us the whole story. Loads of women– and BIPOC–led media platforms will give you solid news you’re going to need in the coming years. Invest in them. My faves are The 19th, Media 2070, America Dissected, and this newsletter. Where we put our financial attention matters, and we should invest in the people and platforms that both inform us and help us to find our way toward each other.

• Shop with intention. Capitalism is the sea we swim in. We have to start using this tool to change the social problems plaguing us. What would happen if you deleted that pesky Amazon app? Try it, even for a month. Prioritize local businesses (for us in Texas, HEB absolutely counts) run by women and BIPOC entrepreneurs. Invest in them.

• Invest toward legacy with integrity in your heart and mind. I don’t know much about investing, so I’m working hard to listen to and read and learn from experts in the investment sector who are committed to socially impactful capitalism (if such a thing truly exists). Did your family’s generational wealth come at the cost of another? How can you do better in your wealth planning to ensure you are not doing the same?

• Care for the folks who matter to you, the activists, who are doing the work the world needs. This can be financial care, but it can also be about sending a thank you card, sharing your social network with them through a post or dinner party, or inviting them to do something nourishing with you.

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1. Here are some sources that continue to influence my conceptualization + vision of mutual aid:

1. Mutual Aid, by Dean Spade

2. Mutual Aid Podcast

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