ABOUT US

Our Mission 

Marronage Mutual Aid builds survival infrastructure for organizers pushed out of housing and work by design. We exist so that minoritized organizers can stay housed, stay employed, and stay in the movement.

Our Vision

We envision a world where working-class BIPOC, trans, queer, and disabled people have the material stability to lead, organize, and build the movements our liberation requires.

Our Story

In 2021, we launched an informal mutual aid project that was antiracist, anticapitalist, and abolitionist to support students and families excluded by the CUNY system. Over three years, we stood alongside students navigating domestic violence, homelessness, hunger, and systemic discrimination. 

Liberation is not a dream but a practice. 

Together, we are building the spaces our community has been searching for.

What began as a grassroots resource-sharing and microgranting project quickly became a powerful lesson in both the failures of neoliberalism, particularly the charity model, and the transformative potential of community care.

One experience crystallized this need. In 2020, a Black, working-class, disabled student organizer faced eviction from his dorm, with no family or safety net to turn to. While we fought the administration for his and other displaced students’ right to housing, and succeeded in securing an additional year of housing, he was ultimately forced into the shelter system. That is, until the community stepped in. Through crowdfunding, we raised the deposit he and others needed to access long-term housing and helped with employment support.

Since then, we’ve expanded our efforts to support organizers and movement workers who have become targets of repressive landlords and systems, helping them resist eviction.

These stories inspired Marronage Mutual Aid to meet urgent needs while imagining a freer future. 

Our Values

Solidarity

We stand shoulder to shoulder with all communities championing anticapitalist justice as we confront intersecting supremacies.

Innovation

We continually seek innovative solutions, adapting to address the ever-evolving needs of our organizers and communities.

Ease

We approach our work with boundless empathy and compassion, acknowledging our students and organizers' unique challenges, and striving to eliminate unnecessary hurdles.

Sustainability

We are resolutely committed to creating sustainable solutions, exemplified by our pioneering tiny house projects, to ensure long-term housing stability.

Safety

We believe organizers deserve bodily, emotional, financial and mental safety. 

Our Core Beliefs

  • "Nobody's free until everybody's free.” 
    -Fannie Lou Hamer

    Our commitment to building a world that is about the liberation of all from systems of domination. We must attend to the ways that those systems operate within us and within our organizations and enterprises, or else we risk replicating the very things we are working to transform. We commit to addressing the harm created by systemic oppression, including the ways we and our communities are both harmed by and benefit from dominance, privilege, and oppression. We understand this work takes place on a scale from the local and interpersonal level to that of global networks.

    - Borrowed from Solidarity Economy

  • Mutual aid is the radical act of caring for each other while working to change the intersecting supremacies of the world. 

    - Dean Spade

  • We believe that much of our trauma—both interpersonal and systemic—stems from racial and colonial capitalism, interconnected systems built on the exploitation of natural resources and marginalized racial communities in the U.S. and globally. Dismantling these systems is essential. Our work takes a step toward breaking this cycle by fostering community-centered alternatives rooted in justice.

  • Kali Akuno, one of the founders of Cooperation Jackson, a radical experiment in black liberation in Jackson Mississippi, said in order to seriously upend white supremacy and racialized capitalism on a city and national level we have to be willing to experiment on a huge scale, like the white capitalists have been doing for centuries. This project is working towards continuous experimentation.