A Brief History of Helping

The oldest safety net

Mutual aid is not a modern invention. It is arguably the oldest form of social organization, predating both the market and the state. The principle is simple: people in a community pool their resources and labor so that no one faces hardship alone. No one applies. No one is a “beneficiary.” Everyone is both giver and receiver, depending on the day.

The Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, observing both animal behavior and human history, argued in 1902 that cooperation—not competition—was the primary driver of evolutionary success. He called it mutual aid, and traced it from insect colonies through medieval guilds to the friendly societies of Victorian England.¹

Kropotkin wasn't being sentimental. He was making an empirical claim: species that cooperate survive longer than species that don't. The same, he argued, is true of human communities. The villages that shared grain through winter outlasted the ones that hoarded it. The neighborhoods where people looked after each other's children had lower mortality. Mutual aid wasn't charity—it was strategy.

A tradition with many names

Mutual aid has taken different forms in every culture and era. The practice is universal; the vocabulary is local.

In the American South, enslaved people organized secret mutual aid societies—pooling money for burials, medical care, and sometimes freedom. After emancipation, these became the backbone of Black civic life. The Free African Society, founded in Philadelphia on April 12, 1787—the same year as the Constitutional Convention, also in Philadelphia—is often cited as the first formally organized mutual aid group in the United States. Its eight founding members each contributed one shilling per month to a fund for widows, orphans, and the sick.²

Jewish communities across Europe built gemilut hasadim—acts of lovingkindness—into the fabric of daily life, formalized through burial societies (chevra kadisha) and interest-free loan funds. In the Caribbean, sou-sou savings circles let neighbors pool money and take turns drawing from the pot—a structure economists call a ROSCA, or rotating savings and credit association, that appears independently worldwide. In Korea, the same practice is called kye and has operated for centuries.³

Not all mutual aid involves money. In Oaxaca, Mexico, tequio is a system of communal labor: everyone over eighteen contributes work to collective projects—road repair, school construction, dam maintenance—and the obligation is recognized in the state constitution. In South America, the equivalent is minga. The principle is the same: reciprocity of effort, no ledger kept.

In nineteenth-century Britain, the friendly societies formalized mutual aid into membership-based institutions with dues, benefits, and democratic governance. The largest, the Independent Order of Oddfellows, had over a million members. At their peak, an estimated 80% of working-class men belonged to a friendly society—far more than belonged to trade unions or churches. These were not charities. They were collective self-insurance, managed by the members themselves.⁴

What all these forms share is a structure: horizontal, reciprocal, and trust-based. Help doesn't flow from a central authority downward. It flows between neighbors, laterally, based on proximity and need. Nobody has to prove they deserve it.

What happened to mutual aid?

The welfare state didn't destroy mutual aid—but it did replace much of its function. When the government provides unemployment insurance, health care, and a pension, the urgency of the neighborhood collection dims. This is, in many ways, a good thing: public institutions can operate at a scale and consistency that informal networks cannot.

But something was lost. The sociologist Robert Putnam documented the decline in his 2000 book Bowling Alone: Americans were joining fewer clubs, attending fewer meetings, and knowing fewer of their neighbors. The bonds that mutual aid both required and produced were fraying.⁵

The result is a paradox: we have more institutional safety nets than ever, but when those institutions fail—as they do, routinely, especially for marginalized communities—the informal networks that once caught people are weaker than they were a century ago.

This is the gap Silver is designed to fill.

Crisis as catalyst

The modern mutual aid revival has been driven by crisis. When institutions fail, people remember the old forms.

• 2005 After Hurricane Katrina, the Common Ground Collective organized relief in New Orleans when FEMA was still figuring out its paperwork. Volunteers gutted houses, set up medical clinics, and distributed supplies—all without waiting for permission.
• 2012 In the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, Occupy Sandy mobilized over 60,000 volunteers and raised over a million dollars in a decentralized relief effort across New York City. Using social media and spreadsheets, they reached communities like Red Hook that FEMA, the National Guard, and the Red Cross had not yet entered.⁶
• 2020 COVID-19 triggered the largest spontaneous mutual aid mobilization in modern history. In the UK alone, over 4,300 mutual aid groups formed in weeks, comprising roughly three million people. In the United States, trackers counted at least 800 new groups, though the actual number was certainly higher. In Brooklyn, a single group—Bed-Stuy Strong—supported 28,000 people over fifteen months. Dean Spade's Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) became the movement's handbook.
• 2025 The Los Angeles wildfires overwhelmed institutional response. Grassroots tech efforts filled the void: a crisis-response map built with AI tools drew 280,000 views; the Mutual Aid LA Network maintained a public spreadsheet updated around the clock by volunteers. The experience revealed both the promise and the fragility of building in isolation—and led directly to the founding of new organizations dedicated to durable mutual aid infrastructure.

Each crisis teaches the same lesson: when official channels are overwhelmed, the first responders are neighbors. The question is whether the infrastructure they need is already in place when the crisis arrives—or whether they have to build it from scratch every time.

The infrastructure problem

Mutual aid has always had an infrastructure problem. The practice is decentralized by nature, but decentralization makes it fragile. Knowledge is local. Organization is ad hoc. When the crisis passes, the spreadsheets go stale, the group chats go quiet, and the next time disaster strikes, people start from zero.

The sociologist Eric Klinenberg calls this social infrastructure: the physical and organizational structures that shape how people interact. Libraries, parks, barbershops, community centers—these are the places where social bonds form and mutual aid becomes possible. When social infrastructure decays, isolation follows.⁷

Digital tools have partially addressed this. Google Docs, Airtable, WhatsApp groups, Instagram infographics—these became the improvisational infrastructure of COVID-era mutual aid. But they are borrowed tools, designed for other purposes. They don't persist. They don't connect across neighborhoods. They don't make the network legible to newcomers.

What if mutual aid had infrastructure that was purpose-built? Not a platform that extracts value from its users, but a commons—owned by no one, available to everyone, designed to make the invisible networks of neighborhood help visible and durable?

What Silver is

Silver is an attempt to build that infrastructure. It is, at its simplest, a map—a living, community-maintained map of resources, organizations, and offers of help in a given city. But beneath the simplicity is an architecture designed to respect the principles mutual aid is built on.

Local control. Each city runs its own instance of Silver, maintained by local organizers who know the terrain. New York's map is run by New Yorkers. Los Angeles's map is run by Angelenos. Nobody in a distant headquarters decides what shows up on your neighborhood's map.

Federation, not centralization. The cities are connected—they can share resources, patterns, and tools—but they are not controlled from the top. This is the same structure that makes the internet resilient: no single point of failure, no single point of control.⁸

Open source. Silver's code is public. Anyone can inspect it, improve it, or run their own instance. This isn't just an ideology—it's a trust mechanism. Community organizations need to know that the infrastructure they depend on can't be pulled out from under them by a company's quarterly earnings call.

Built for steady-state, not just crisis. Most mutual aid infrastructure is built in the heat of emergency and abandoned when the heat subsides. Silver is designed to be useful on an ordinary Tuesday—a standing map of who can help with what, always up to date, always available. When crisis hits, the infrastructure is already there.

The map is the network

A map of resources is useful. But Silver is more than a directory. By making the network of help visible—who offers what, who needs what, where the density is and where the gaps are—it creates a feedback loop. Organizers can see which neighborhoods are underserved. Neighbors can see that help is closer than they thought. The act of mapping changes what is mapped.

The urbanist Jane Jacobs understood this. She argued that the life of a city depends not on grand plans but on the fine-grained, sidewalk-level interactions between people who see each other regularly. “The trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts,” she wrote. Silver is a digital extension of that sidewalk.⁹

This is ultimately what Silver bets on: that making the existing networks of help visible will strengthen them. That a food pantry with a pin on the map will serve more people. That a neighbor who knows they're not alone will reach out sooner. That the ancient practice of mutual aid, given modern infrastructure, will prove as durable as Kropotkin believed it was.

The bet

We are, in the language of the technologists, building infrastructure. But the infrastructure we're building didn't start with us. It started with the first human who shared food with a stranger. It continued through the friendly societies, the burial funds, the sou-sou circles, the Occupy Sandy phone trees, and the COVID-era grocery runs.

Silver is what happens when this ancient practice meets open-source technology and federated architecture. The bet is simple: if you make the network visible, people will use it. If you make it easy to contribute, people will contribute. If you build it as a commons, it will endure.

The bet is on you. It always was.