Love, Integrity, Action: Notes on the Future of Mutual Aid
Union Mutual Aid (UMA) has spent the last few years doing something very simple: meeting direct need, as much as we can. We started with cash—no questions asked, then food, then a pantry, and now a 24/7 pantry. It was the work we set out to do but if any mutual aid group stops at meeting need, it misses what makes it powerful. The point was never just to get money and food to people, as necessary as that is. The point was to build something between us—something that changes how we understand our call to one another, what we owe each other, and what we can do together.
In two and a half years, Union Mutual Aid has become the largest participatory organization on campus. Since we started in January 2024, we’ve collected nearly $50,000—and distributed more than $40,000 directly to students in food and funds—and we expect our budget to be about $30,000 in the 2026–2027 academic year. Those numbers matter, not as a report, but because they tell a story: people showed up. Students and friends in the Union community chose to be part of something that refuses a culture of “deservingness” and simply works to meet needs as much as we can.
UMA’s next step, and a major way we are growing next year, is a deeper commitment to building community, both for the common good and as the ground for power—student power now, and the kind of power we can carry with us for the rest of our lives. Not in theory, and not someday, but in practice.
What that looks like in practice:
More spaces to gather — more events and not simply events, but places where people spend real time together, build trust, disagree, and develop the relationships that make collective action possible.
Guests in conversation, not performance — organizers, thinkers, and practitioners who come to engage with us, not present at us, helping us connect to broader struggles for justice.
Real work on values — naming, debating, and practicing what we actually believe, including how we treat each other and what we are willing to act on together.
Deeper participation across the community — students, alumni, caucuses, clubs, faculty, and staff joining in building something that supports the UTS student community.
Continued material support, expanded — strengthening the pantry, sustaining direct cash, and extending that to include our incarcerated classmates (who, until now, have been left out while we have struggled to arrange fund transfers to them via the carceral system).
Ongoing advocacy — continuing to work on matters related to cost of attendance, financial aid, housing for students at severe risk, housing and billing policies and practices, academic course load caps, and other everyday institutional practices that connect to economic justice and shape students’ lives, while also building more space and support for advocacy itself.
Training and collective action — building the skills and relationships needed to organize, to act together, and, when necessary, to move into forms of collective political action, including civil disobedience.
This work sits in a longer tradition. Mutual aid emerges from practices developed in communities of color, Indigenous communities, and especially by women who have sustained care and resistance under constraint. As Dean Spade writes, mutual aid is not charity. It is a way of meeting immediate needs while building the capacity to act together and challenge the conditions that produce those needs. Saidiya Hartman shows how survival practices are also sites of imagination and resistance. adrienne maree brown reminds us that what we practice at a small scale becomes the pattern at a larger one. Sara Ahmed names the friction of speaking and acting inside institutions, and the cost of refusing to stay quiet. Together, they point to a simple truth: communities are not administered into existence, they are built—through practice, tension, and people choosing to stay and act together.
At Union, this work unfolds within real constraints. We are a small institution. Resources are limited. Relationships overlap. Visibility carries risk. These conditions shape how we speak, how we disagree, and how we act. They can make it easier to stay quiet, or to keep things at the level of private conversation, rather than working things through together in the open. But they also make this work more important. Building community that can hold disagreement, speak honestly, and act together is not optional—it is the foundation for anything we hope to build.
If we are serious about this next phase, the culture has to deepen into being more firmly rooted in community values. Three values guide us as we work for justice: love, integrity, and action—and we look forward to exploring them with you in community, in ways large and small, next school year.
Love is the hardest to name. It makes people uncomfortable—and not just because it can sound soft or sentimental. Hannah Arendt warned that love can turn inward, away from the work of acting in the world. And sometimes it does. But the deeper discomfort is that love calls us to something higher and exposes the gap between that call and how we actually behave. It asks more of us than we want to give. So when we say love, we mean it in a real way, in a hard way. Not sentiment, but practice. No gossip. No quiet undermining. A willingness to speak directly, to hear critique without shutting down, and to stay in the work even when it is uncomfortable. Something closer to what Cornel West names: loving our crooked neighbor with our crooked heart, no exceptions. Love, in this sense, is not the absence of conflict. It is the refusal to abandon each other within it.
Integrity is the line we draw against performance. It means saying what we mean and doing what we say. It means not hiding behind language—especially the language of justice—without being willing to act. It means being courteous to one another. It means resisting the pull to posture, to signal, to appear aligned without doing the work. Without integrity, nothing we build holds. It means collaborating based on merit and work, not personality.
Action is how justice becomes real. Not as a word we merely agree with but as something we do together. It means organizing, building student and working-class power, and acting collectively on the conditions we share. It means recognizing and resisting white supremacy and patriarchy not just in theory but in practice. And it means being willing, when necessary, to move into forms of collective action—including civil disobedience—that challenge the systems producing the harm we are trying to address.
We’re going to work hard on love, integrity, and action this summer and next year—in ourselves, within UMA, all over Union, and in the broader world. This is the direction we are moving. A thickening. Service not just to meet immediate tangible need, but to build a community that cares better for one another and for the larger world. A community that answers more calls for service and thereby creates more justice for more people. A community in action. Not just here at Union but in the lives we carry forward.
We are, honestly, tired from this year. Yet we are invigorated by the support of the community, the incredible need and a desire to help meet it, a calling to work more closely in community, and a genuine excitement to engage in conversations around love, integrity, and action, to find more of our own lovability and watch others find theirs—and to see what comes from that in service to others.
Dorothy Day said “Everyone wants a revolution, but nobody wants to do the dishes.” At UMA we see ourselves as dishwashers. We hope you will be dishwashers with us. Love. Integrity. Action.
We hope you will come with us.
Thank you for all the love you have shown your fellow classmates and for allowing UMA to facilitate that support. We are grateful.
If you’d like to get involved with Union Mutual Aid,
please email umutualaid@gmail.com.