Mutual Aid As Climate Adaptation: Reconfiguring Knowledge and Power through Community-based Research
Manasa Bollempalli, Department of Human Ecology, Rutgers University
Nuzhat Fatema, Department of Geography, Rutgers University
Amy Li, School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University
Kevin Bass, Homies Helping Homies Research Collective
Anthony Adams, Homies Helping Homies Research Collective
Elisabeth Gilmore, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Carleton University
DeeDee Bennett-Gayle, College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity, University at Albany, State University of New York
Victoria Ramenzoni, Department of Human Ecology, Rutgers University
Abstract: This article explores mutual aid as a vital form of climate adaptation through a partnership with Homies Helping Homies, a grassroots organization in South Philadelphia. Challenging extractive research models, we show how mutual aid networks serve as infrastructures of care and resistance, addressing crises like extreme heat, food insecurity, and water contamination. Extractive research models often treat communities as sources of data rather than partners in knowledge production. In contrast, infrastructures of care—like those built by mutual aid networks—are grounded in reciprocity, trust, and long-term relational accountability. These contrasting logics illuminate why traditional approaches frequently fail to capture or support community-based adaptation. By centering community knowledge and lived experience, our work exposes the disconnect between institutional climate discourse and marginalized realities. We argue for participatory approaches that recognize mutual aid not as a stopgap, but as climate adaptation in practice—offering pathways toward justice and resilience from the ground up.
Homies Helping Homies Office space, including food storage fridge. Picture credit: Manasa Bollempalli.
Reframing Climate Research through Mutual Aid
Climate adaptation research has long been shaped by top-down methodologies that often fail to capture the realities of marginalized communities (Eriksen et al., 2021; Holler et al., 2020). While universities and policy institutions seek to generate knowledge on climate risks, they frequently exclude or misunderstand everyday voices, experiences, and resilience strategies (Cvitanovic et al., 2019). This exclusion is not just an oversight but a structural issue embedded in the ways climate knowledge is produced, validated, and disseminated (Few et al., 2007; Helgeson et al., 2024). In this piece, we draw on our research partnership with Homies Helping Homies (HHH), a mutual aid organization in South Philadelphia, to argue that mutual aid networks embody alternative practices and epistemologies of climate adaptation that challenge or stand in contrast to dominant assumptions and deserve greater recognition in academic and policy debates.
HHH, now a mutual-aid organization, was founded as an emergent organization that provided medical supplies to organizers marching in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in 2020. It came together as a collaboration between young residents in the Point Breeze neighborhood in Philadelphia. Our partnership with HHH evolved in the old-fashioned way, through friends of friends who volunteered with and highly recommended them as potential research partners for us. Following an initial meeting in their garage-turned-office and pantry, they invited us to join their monthly food distribution events. These events are held in many locations, but typically in a narrow side street in Point Breeze, where volunteers come early to set up tables and load various groceries and food items gathered from HHH’s network of food kitchens and organizations. For the next year, our team drove down from New Jersey to Philadelphia and volunteered with HHH, setting up tables, distributing food, and introducing ourselves to the residents at the end of their collection. We would explain our research, ask if they would be interested in participating through an interview, take down their name and number, and call them from our offices at a time that was convenient for them. Initially, we planned to conduct interviews during HHH events; however, we quickly realized that was not feasible in terms of logistics, anonymity, and the safety of participants. Residents would usually be in a hurry to go home to refrigerate perishable food items or be constrained by work hours.
In our research process, we engaged with mutual aid not only as a political practice of climate adaptation but also as a methodological framework for climate research. In the context of South Philadelphia—where communities face intersecting vulnerabilities including extreme heat, food deserts, flooding, aging housing infrastructure, utility shutoffs, and systemic disinvestment—mutual aid groups like Homies Helping Homies (HHH) are filling critical gaps. Through skill sharing, food distribution, and access to supplies like Narcan and cooling resources, HHH helps residents navigate both acute shocks and ongoing stressors exacerbated by climate change. These practices may not be labeled as “climate adaptation” in dominant discourses, but they materially increase community resilience, autonomy, and capacity to respond to climate-related risks. At the same time, we approached mutual aid as a research methodology: one that rejects extractive logics and centers relational accountability, shared authority, and reciprocity. This dual engagement allowed us to examine mutual aid as both a grassroots adaptation practice and a model for co-producing climate knowledge—aligned with participatory approaches in disaster research and public health (Vasileiou et al., 2022). Mutual aid, in contrast to charity or community service, is explicitly political: it operates through solidarity rather than dependency and aims to transform conditions rather than temporarily relieve them (Spade, 2020). Infrastructures of care—like those built by mutual aid networks—are grounded in reciprocity, trust, and long-term relational accountability. On the other hand, extractive research models often treat communities as sources of data rather than partners in knowledge production; a kind of relationship that is becoming more and more contested as inclusiveness and equity take the foreground in academic practices (Heyne et al., 2024). The contrasting logics among the two models of engagement ultimately illuminate why traditional research approaches frequently fail to capture or support community-based adaptation.
In the next few sections, we reflect upon some of the key dimensions that have emerged so far in this partnership. In our reflection, we engage with several questions posed by this call, particularly: How do histories and ethnographies of collective movements of refusal/resistance render alternative stakes and narratives of climate change? What forms of knowledge emerge when we center refusal and resistance in climate research? What happens when environmental crises disrupt dominant ways of knowing and force new configurations of expertise?
Mutual Aid as an Act of Climate Resistance
Mutual aid is often understudied in mainstream climate adaptation discourse as peripheral or temporary—a stopgap solution rather than a transformative force (Archibald, 2007; Klenk et al., 2017). However, in working with HHH, we found that mutual aid is a critical and ongoing strategy of climate resilience, not just a reaction to crises but a proactive reconfiguration of care, power, and survival. While HHH was originally formed in response to the systemic failures exposed by the George Floyd protests, its work has rapidly expanded into environmental issues such as food insecurity, extreme heat, and water crises (Homies Helping Homies, n.d.). As other institutions struggled – or at times neglected – to respond to these overlapping crises, HHH stepped into the void, offering immediate relief while building long-term networks of care and resistance.
Through food distributions, resource-sharing, and place-based organizing, mutual aid groups like HHH cultivate alternative infrastructures of survival that are independent of, and often in opposition to, state-led interventions. HHH’s mission is to reduce the everyday stress of procuring essential items to help residents get out of survival mode and reduce their dependency on exclusionary and oppressive systems that often keep them in poverty. They envision social justice as “a self-sufficient entity where the community is served by the community (Homies Helping Homies, n.d.).” Typically, they serve anywhere between 60-90 people per tabling event, thrice a month. The residents comprised were diverse in age, household, and racial/ethnic composition, ranging from low-income, unhoused, elderly, and young adult individuals to working families of Caucasian, African American, mixed-race, as well as Chinese, Vietnamese, Hispanic, and African backgrounds. In addition to fresh produce and provisions, they also distribute essential bags with toothbrushes, toilet paper, paper towels, and other personal care items. They supply over 900+ essential bags per year and have delivered roughly 4800 lbs. of essential goods to poverty-impacted individuals and families within Point Breeze and beyond.
Most neighbors who come by the table take items to their families, supporting an additional 1-4 people back home. HHH operates on the principle that collective care-work constitutes a practice of anti-violence. Rather than relying on punitive systems or institutional interventions, HHH addresses the root causes of harm—poverty, neglect, food insecurity, and lack of access to basic services—through mutual aid and community solidarity. By providing healthy food, education on navigating essential services, harm-reduction tools, and pathways to recovery, HHH works to interrupt cycles of violence before they begin. This preventative, care-based model shifts the focus from punishment to healing, demonstrating that safety and resilience can emerge from within the community itself. That is, by supplying those in need with access to healthy foods, education on procuring basic services, instances of harm-reduction, and opportunities for recovery, the aim is to empower those vulnerable to provide for their families. Beginning as a group of people pooling resources together in 2020, they have now grown to include a dynamic network of individuals and organizations across Philadelphia to support their community. Practices such as those of HHH challenge the dominant assumption that resilience must be state-sanctioned or institutionally validated. Instead, it suggests that resilience is already being enacted at the community level, albeit in ways that resist easy quantification or bureaucratic incorporation (Spade, 2020).
Disrupting Institutional Climate Knowledge
Traditional climate adaptation research often relies on producing knowledge through formalized systems, such as data-driven assessments, predictive modeling, and policy frameworks. While these tools are valuable, they cannot fully encapsulate the lived realities of those most affected by climate change (Klenk et al., 2017). Our initial efforts to engage with South Philadelphia communities revealed how climate concerns were often framed by researchers in ways that did not resonate locally. For instance, when we asked residents about “climate change,” many dismissed it as abstract or irrelevant, or considered it under the broader lower quality of life within certain zip codes. For example, one resident told us:
“Climate as in like the people around the area, the weather conditions and structurally like how the city, the city does not care about this zip code, so that's the problem…this is a low income zip code, *****, and compared to my grandmother's area , I've seen it's like night and day. So, if they're working on the street, they'll take longer. And if something were to happen, like the electricity were to go out, they do not call the residents of the neighborhood and, ‘oh we are turning off the electricity for a certain amount of hours as they are turning off water.’ So just like stuff like this, it's just very inappropriate and frustrating.”[1]
However, when we reframed our questions—asking about extreme heat, flooding, or the 2023 water contamination crisis—we uncovered deeply embedded knowledge of environmental change and adaptation. Residents were acutely aware of these disruptions but understood them through lenses of economic precarity, institutional neglect, and historical disinvestment rather than through the language of climate policy.
“I think Philly since September last year has been experiencing both winter and even rainstorms. I think it's too much. I think right now I've never had that heat in Philly. We've had heat go to 109 degrees in Philly... There's a time when all my ACs are on, I have three ACs, and it was not working.... Now, the externality which comes with that is that I have to pay a high electric bill.... from this spillover, from these negative externalities. Not the direct costs, but in looking at the kilobytes, you're going to end up paying a higher electricity bill, so during a snowstorm if the internet gets disorganized you are going to buy more data. So, it's mainly the spillover effects which are affecting us, like just in terms of flood and south Philly, you end up looking for Uber because you want to go home anyway.”[2]
This gap reveals a fundamental problem: dominant climate knowledge often does not reflect how climate change is actually experienced. Instead of recognizing communities as active agents of climate knowledge production, research frameworks tend to impose pre-existing categories that fail to capture the entanglement of climate risks with social and political structures. Mutual aid networks challenge these epistemic hierarchies by prioritizing lived experience and collective action over expert-driven solutions. Their refusal to wait for institutional validation forces researchers to rethink how we define expertise, whose knowledge counts, and how climate adaptation strategies are co-produced.
Rupture and Reconfiguration: Lessons from Mutual Aid
Our work with HHH ultimately forced us to reconsider our own positionality as researchers. Initially, we approached this project with the assumption that university-led partnerships could “bring climate adaptation knowledge” to communities. In reality, the opposite happened: our research team had to unlearn academic conventions, reposition ourselves as participants rather than experts, and recognize the knowledge already embedded in mutual aid networks. Key lessons from this process include:
For marginalized communities, climate adaptation is already happening outside of formal institutions. Organizations like HHH do not need external validation to enact climate resilience. Their work reveals self-sustaining infrastructures of care that often outperform institutional responses in speed, efficiency, and accessibility.
Refusal is a generative force. Mutual aid networks do not simply “fill in gaps” left by institutions—they actively refuse bureaucratic, top-down approaches that fail to serve communities. This refusal generates new configurations of knowledge, where survival strategies emerge from within, rather than being imposed from above.
The climate crisis is inseparable from structural inequalities. For many marginalized communities, climate adaptation is not a separate issue but part of an ongoing struggle against displacement, systemic inequalities, food insecurity, and economic precarity. Any research that fails to integrate these realities will ultimately be inadequate.
Conclusion: Toward Transformative Climate Research
If climate adaptation research is to be truly transformative, it must shift from extractive to reciprocal, from top-down to community-led, and from institutionally sanctioned to radically inclusive (Fazey et al., 2020). This means centering mutual aid as a legitimate and necessary climate adaptation strategy, rather than treating it as informal or temporary. Our experience with HHH underscores the urgency of rethinking how climate knowledge is produced and by whom. Climate resilience is not merely a technical problem to be solved by institutions; it is an ongoing process of collective action, refusal, and reconfiguration. Mutual aid is not just a response to the climate crisis—it is climate adaptation itself. By embedding within these networks, researchers can move beyond the limitations of traditional climate knowledge production and participate in the co-creation of alternative futures—ones built not on institutional oversight but on community agency and self-determination.
Acknowledgements
This work is supported by the National Science Foundation as part of the Megalopolitan Coastal Transformation Hub (MACH) under NSF award ICER-2103754. This is MACH contribution number [78]. The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.