Solidarity projects: mutual aid, timebanks, community unions and volunteers

Introduction This chapter describes the types of community project that might help to address the care deficit of coming years. It focuses on mutual aid, assessing its capacity to grow a culture of mutual support between neighbours, and to help build collective projects for supporting family carers and the growth of non-profit social enterprises. Mutual aid is broadly defined here; the examples described include the mutual aid groups (MAGs) of the COVID-19 pandemic period, timebanks and community unions. An example of traditional volunteering, the NHS Volunteer Responder scheme, is introduced by way of contrast, to show both its potential and its limitations. MAGs and timebanks could support the growth of social enterprises, including micro-enterprises and care cooperatives, of the kind mentioned in Chapter 4. They can help to run collective services like day centres and lunch clubs. Like traditional volunteering, projects based on mutual aid principles have potential for augmenting the supply of informal care for individuals, but these principles are somewhat different from the traditional volunteering model and carry several advantages, as this chapter will describe. Timebanks may be considered a form of mutual aid, insofar as they offer exchanges of support between individuals. While this has been more prominent in their history in the United States, China and Japan, timebanks’ main function in the UK has been to provide a volunteering opportunity which helps people build supportive personal friendship networks, alleviating isolation, and offering sociable exercise and a sense of purpose.