This oral history project is a collaboration between Rhode Island's Alliance to Mobilize Our Resistance and Brown University's Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in the Americas. It was the recipient of a 2021 Humanities Lab Grant funded by the Mellon Foundation and CSREA. The project received additional training and support from Brown's Center for Digital Scholarship

COVID-19’s arrival and the associated federal and state responses have magnified inequalities that currently exist in labor markets, healthcare, and housing. As a result, responses to the pandemic intersected with how states and communities provide services that are meant to improve health outcomes in the United States. Co-morbidity is shaped by a set of risks including:

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(1) increased risk of disease transmission by working in “essential”, low wage service sector jobs;

(2) lack of access to flexible resources, like information about social distancing and personal protective equipment; and

(3) historic and structural exclusion from financial institutions, which disqualify marginalized communities from being able to access unemployment and government stimulus checks.

 

In response to this shrinking social safety net, mutual aid efforts emerged in Rhode Island to fill some of these gaps created by a lagging governmental response. Yet, by definition, these efforts emerged with relatively little infrastructural support. 

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This oral history of mutual aid in Rhode Island aims to capture and digitally archive the spontaneous moment of collective action, while drawing future lessons for how social welfare policy can reduce and eradicate inequality.