Author’s note:
This piece was written by four of the main organizers of the Colorado College Mutual Aid Fund. Our group is run with a decentralized leadership model. This means that our writing is representative of some of the main organizers’ experiences, but CC Mutual Aid is much bigger than any of the individuals involved in it. We hope and expect for it to evolve as the needs of our community do.
As students at Colorado College, we are surrounded with messaging about the responsibilities we have to our community. Whether communicated through BADASS training or Clean Plate Club stickers, CC students are reminded of the importance of caring for our community from the moment we arrive on campus. But come the absolute chaos that was mid-March this year, many of us felt like those networks of support were harder to access, particularly at a time when we needed them most. With our campus community spread apart due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of us came together to create Colorado College Mutual Aid. We did this in an effort to support our community, in whatever way possible, when it became clear that the school’s official Emergency Fund was not providing adequate aid. The Mutual Aid Fund exists to create an opportunity for our campus community to join together and support one another, regardless of our physical proximity.
Divisions between students coming from families with higher incomes and those with lower ones have always been apparent at CC, but when campus shut down, these divisions were exacerbated and more visible than ever before. The contrast between students struggling to find a quiet place with a stable internet connection to participate in their Zoom classes and those who left cities to spend the semester in their families’ second homes was striking. For a school that endorses a culture of care, CC’s administration came up short in providing necessary support and resources for its students. Perhaps things got lost in the chaos of logistics, or perhaps the school wasn’t aware of what its students needed, but, like so many other CC students, we were upset with the lack of communication and transparency that came from the school surrounding pandemic support. To us, it seemed like it was time to put the frustration with administration and students’ good intentions to practical use in a way that would attempt to tangibly help our community members.
This work does not exist in a vacuum. Mutual aid has historically been used by marginalized communities to create new frameworks when existing ones do not provide adequate support. Mutual aid is not limited to monetary support; examples of non-monetary mutual aid include the work of the Black Panther Party in providing community services such as the free breakfast program, or the Sylvia Rivera Law Project’s free legal services for trans and nonbinary low-income and/or people of color. There are a couple of key differences between mutual aid and charity that we want to highlight here, as the concept of mutual aid is only recently coming to the forefront of mainstream conversations. Mutual aid focuses on solidarity, not charity. All gifts are non-conditional, which means that no one has to prove their need in order to receive funds or has to present receipts to the organizers. We trust our community members, value transparency and community leadership, and welcome all feedback. Moreover, we function with the understanding that it is the larger systems of inequality and injustice such as white supremacy, capitalism, and the cis-hetero-patriarchy – all of which were further exacerbated and more starkly exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic – that are responsible for individuals’ situations, not the individuals themselves. Every student at CC deserves to have the financial security to take classes without having to worry about paying for groceries or rent.
As mutual aid funds emerged at different colleges across the country, it seemed that the CC community had the potential to greatly benefit from a system of mutual aid. We were particularly inspired by the work of student organizers at Scripps College in Claremont, Calif. in the “Nobody Fails at Scripps” group that pushed for a universal pass/fail grading policy after the shift to online learning. They mobilized in June to organize a mutual aid fund and called for privileged community members to redistribute their wealth – a concept many CC students had been thinking and posting about on social media.
As of 2017, the student body at Colorado College had the highest median parent income out of 2,395 colleges in the United States and had the second highest share of students from the top 1%. Conversely, only 2% of the student body came from the bottom 5%; CC is 2,357th out of 2,395 colleges in the United States in this regard. We attend a school with enormous financial privilege among its student and alumni body, and we started CC Mutual Aid in an attempt to utilize that privilege for the good of our community.
So, in late July, we established CC Mutual Aid as a branch of the Collective for Antiracism and Liberation at CC (CAL). CAL is a student-led collective that formed over the summer, following the resurgence of Black Lives Matter protests and uprisings across the country, to serve as a hub for organizing between students, faculty, staff, and local activists. CAL primarily focuses on issues of policing (they are currently negotiating changes in the contract between CC and CSPD), and the politics of the group are self-described as antiracist and abolitionist.
We began as a group of about six people, supported by a larger group of fifteen who have dedicated up to hundreds of hours writing documents, creating Instagram posts, tracking donations, and problem-solving in Zoom meetings. Our group uses a decentralized form of leadership and anyone can join at any time (like actually—if you email coloradocollegemutualaid@gmail.com or message us on Instagram and ask to help, watch out because we’ll stick you in the group chat and then you’ll immediately have a meeting to attend in 15). Everyone contributes to the workload, often anonymously, creating a supportive and humble atmosphere where no one seeks credit or recognition. This humility allows for quick-acting functionality and a type of ease in decision-making that still considers all aspects of the issue. We strive to remain thoughtful and genuine, to create a culture in which all members fully listen to each other and actively seek to hear and elevate those whose needs are often lost in the overwhelming privilege of this school. We would love to have as many voices as possible chiming in!
Our values became especially important when we were faced with one of our largest and most influential choices – incorporation into the school. In the first month of organizing, we used an outline for mutual aid on college campuses published by the organizers of “Nobody Fails at Scripps,” fundraising mainly through Instagram and collecting donations through Venmo and GoFundMe. As we progressed further in our planning, Will Schiffelbein, CC’s Director of Annual Giving, reached out to us to learn about CC Mutual Aid. During our conversation, it became clear that our original plan to redistribute funds through Venmo was not in the best interest of the recipients. Redistribution received through Venmo is classified as income, so the recipients would need to file them as such, possibly impacting their future eligibility for financial aid.
Though we were initially wary about losing autonomy, many positive aspects have come out of working directly with the school. We spent a few weeks drafting the terms of our incorporation in such a way that gave us confidence that this decision was best for our recipients. Our biggest concern was that we would no longer have control over how and to whom the money was redistributed and that as a result, we wouldn't be able to provide the non-conditional support that is at the core of mutual aid. We were also worried that incorporation would make it too similar to the Emergency Fund, which proved to be inadequate in distributing aid, and would render the Mutual Aid Fund unnecessary. Thankfully, this has not been the case – we have retained essentially full autonomy over the fund, and the school’s role is mainly to make sure we are not violating federal or college policy. Transparency is one of the core principles of this group, so our terms of agreement with the school, called a Memorandum of Understanding, are available for all to read via the Linktree in our Instagram bio.
Incorporation has benefited us in many, often unexpected, ways. We are able to use the school’s contact database to email, text, or send physical letters to alumni, which has allowed us to fundraise more effectively and to fulfill a higher percentage of our applicants’ requests. We have also connected with various committees that work to fundraise for a specific cause, like the Senior Class Gift Committee and the Young Alumni Donation Committee, who have offered to fundraise for us. Encouragingly, we have found that alumni and students are more excited to donate to funds that directly support students. Members of the Advancement Office are also working to find matching donors and collaborating with us to publish messages about mutual aid on various CC social media platforms, both of which we hope will increase donations.
We are now registered as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, which means all donations are made and redistributed within an official legal framework. We are able to redistribute money through the Office of Financial Aid, allowing the names of recipients to remain anonymous to those on our Application Reviewing Committee. This committee goes through an anonymized version of the application using a formula to redistribute funds based on students’ self reported need. Redistributing funds through the Office of Financial Aid allows us to protect recipients from reductions to their future financial aid. Though we were hesitant at first, and are deeply aware of students’ widespread distrust in the administration—especially in regards to their failure to provide adequate support during COVID-19—we have been so pleasantly surprised by how beneficial incorporation has been for both the students and administration.
Working closely with the school has brought student voices into places they weren’t before, allowing us to present a new understanding of fundraising and student capability to CC administrators. Since our initial meeting, Will Schiffelbein has been our primary contact and advocate in the school administration. With his support and advocacy for our group, the school has been unbelievably understanding, helpful, and trusting of our decisions, allowing us to maintain autonomy and propel our mission forward.
CC Mutual Aid can now work towards more long-term goals, with the hope of continuously backing those in need and providing security when emergencies arise or when a student simply needs support. Our new recurring donation option is an exciting way for us to help students and alumni incorporate redistribution of wealth into their lives on a regular basis by setting up monthly donations. In-person, non-monetary mutual aid options are limited at this time due to the pandemic, but we hope to expand to include more in the future (potentially partnering with CCSGA to provide rides to the polls as we did with rides to storage when campus was shut down after First Block of this year). We hope to spend the next couple of months fundraising and plan to roll out our second round of redistribution around winter break.
We’re excited about the direction that we’re heading in and we hope you all are too! Our experience and newfound relationships with fellow students, alumni, and staff at CC have made us hopeful about the creation of a better and more equitable future for all students at CC. If you’d like to donate, you can provide a one-time donation here, set up a recurring donation here (we’ll send you a sticker!), and learn more on our Instagram or Facebook pages. If you’d like to get involved, please email us at coloradocollegemutualaid@gmail.com.
Pandemics | October 2020