Why We Have So Many Bake Sales
Violence is and always has been everywhere in the United States, as we know. As Christina Sharpe writes in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, “We live in the wake.” This nation, built through colonialism, genocide, white supremacy, and long histories of extraction and control demands a counter-practice of what Sharpe calls “wake work”: forms of joy, care, and imagination that persist in the afterlives of violence.
Students at Union know this atmosphere well. The violence many of us face isn’t always spectacular; it is the slow, daily violence of food running out, rent swallowing entire paychecks, bills piling up, and the humiliation—produced by institutions, not individuals—of having to prove you deserve help. Anyone who has ever had to justify a basic need knows there are a thousand deaths in that.
Union Mutual Aid (UMA) began as a refusal to let one another face that violence alone. Since our founding in January 2024, we’ve distributed more than $30,000 in direct support—funds, food, and meals—with no questions asked. We expand every year because the need is real and the community keeps showing up to build a stronger frame. Next year we’ll also be building an alumni arm so former students can continue supporting the community that sustained them.
We don’t usually talk about UMA in theoretical terms, we’re usually focused on everyday survival: raising money, processing requests, making sure people eat. But every bake sale is a small revolt against the structures that manufacture scarcity. Mutual aid refuses the story that basic needs are personal failures. It insists that abundance is something we build and protect together.
Our refusal to ask why someone needs money is part of that ethic. Worthiness tests are a form of institutional violence, especially for students already navigating racist, classist, or ableist systems. UMA’s stance is simple: people deserve help because they are people. Trust is part of the world we’re trying to build, not a reward for demonstrating worthiness.
Mutual aid is not separate from political struggle; it is political struggle. UMA meets immediate needs while advocating, collectively and individually, for systemic changes students have called for: a higher and more accurate COA, frequent COA reviews, better BYTE re-distribution, expanded and easier emergency grants, greater transparency around financial policies, and the creation of an emergency loan program. We continue asking Union to explore ways—including renegotiating donor restrictions—to better support students. Mutual aid without institutional change is a bandage; mutual aid with institutional change becomes a force.
But the heart of mutual aid is not policy, it’s community. As Mariame Kaba reminds us, “Everything worthwhile is done with others.” Dean Spade notes that mutual aid builds movements by building the relationships that make movements possible. AOC describes it as “radical care,” a practice of the future in the present.
There are also many theological layers. Of course Delores Williams’ community care as sacred practice. Cone’s God of the oppressed. Liberation theology writ large. And the manna economy of the Hebrew Bible that teaches anti-hoarding, communal trust, and daily interdependence. Manna spoils after a day because God refuses the logic of empire. The people must rely on one another, again and again. In our moment, the message is simple: we provide the manna now. Abundance comes through community, not accumulation.
This aligns with what I found in a paper I recently read by Union student (and UMA co-founder, though no longer actively involved in the day to day) Megan Purdie’s reading of Fanon and Arendt: the only force strong enough to counter atmospheric violence is what she calls its opposite: boundary-crossing community. Her work highlights that Fanon shows that colonial violence isolates by design, and that resistance emerges when people break those boundaries and recognize one another as kin and comrades. She points out that Arendt observes that violence often produces collective action, and that political institutions decay when people withdraw their consent. Purdie points us to see that community is the seedbed of resistance and the only force that can counter/stop the state.
Mutual aid enacts that seedbed. It asks people with privilege – including racial, economic, institutional – to show up vulnerably, relinquish control, and be changed by the relationships they enter. Megan notes that Fanon’s “colonized intellectual” becomes part of liberation not through theorizing it, but through being re-formed by community life. That’s a model for us too.
For me, mutual aid is also tied to political grief and political anger. For years I’ve said, “My analysis is Larry Kramer,” whom I met briefly and heard speak in the late 1980s when I was a young ACT UP volunteer in D.C. His work shaped me then and forever. Kramer taught me that we are not actually in service to our communities unless we are willing to feel the anger required to dismantle the systems killing people, spectacularly or quietly. He believed that if we truly let ourselves get angry, we would act, and act up. And of course, it’s easier to act when you carry more privilege. Kramer was blunt about that too: those with more protection have a greater obligation to use it in defense of the community, no matter the price. Feel and state that anger plainly: it’s not lashing out, as administrators sometimes dismiss it; it’s demanding change.
Importantly, mutual aid sits within a long lineage of community survival practiced and taught by persecuted communities: ACT UP, Black mutual aid traditions, Indigenous kinship economies, queer care networks, disability justice circles. Mutual aid is always lineage work. Mutual aid is hearing the ancestors.
But mutual aid is not the full answer. It’s one part of a larger ecosystem—abolition, labor organizing, reparations, political education, institutional transformation. Still, mutual aid is often where people first feel held and first begin to imagine another way of living together—not through theory, but through someone showing up for them, and encouraging them to set down any shame.
This is why I feel something like hope, not naïveté, but what Purdie reminds us that Sameer Yadav calls pessimistic hope: the kind that emerges when we face suffering together instead of alone.
We won’t end violence tomorrow. The world won’t change because of a single bake sale. But every time a student can pay a phone bill, can buy some groceries, can pay for meds, can get a train ticket home for the holidays, every time someone receives support without being interrogated, every time we redistribute abundance instead of hoarding it, we shape the world that comes after violence.
Mutual aid is not charity. It’s not crisis management. It’s the practice of building the house we need while we still live inside the ruins of the old one. There is a poem I love, Gratitude, and have been reading for 20 years. It is by a poet I love, Corneilus Eady. It’s about being a 36 year old Black American poet whose “greatest weakness is an inability to sustain rage”. Talking about his response to racist mongers who said he couldn’t make it in their institutions: “I am a brick in a house that is being built around your house.” And that is what, at our best, mutual aid networks are. It is what UMA tries, in our small way, to be. A brick in a beautiful house that is being built around a broken, violent house.
And that is why we have so many bake sales.
About the Author
Anna Kruse (she/her) is a third year MDiv/MSW student at Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University. She is co-founder and co-chair of Union Mutual Aid and was involved (a little bit) with the mutual aid organization at Georgetown University, where she graduated, at long last, with her Bachelor of Art in 2023.
Donate: You can donate to support the needs of your fellow classmates via Venmo, @UnionMutualAid.
Get Involved: If you want to get involved with UMA, please be in touch with treasurer Ian Chorlian or co-chair Brian Hughes or Bake Sale chair Erika Arthur or Anna Kruse.