The Elements of Mutual Aid

About This project

The Elements of Mutual Aid is an independently produced documentary series profiling over a dozen mutual aid-based projects across North America.

This series gathers the voices of community organizers who are tending grassroots alternatives to systems of oppression. In intimate interviews, we discuss the nuanced work of building trust between neighbors, making decisions horizontally, protecting our communities, sharing the responsibility of communal infrastructure, and more.

Currently in post-production, co-directors Payton McDonald and Leah Ayer will finish editing the series by early 2025. Release is planned for mid 2025. A screening tour back through many of the communities featured in the film will follow release.

Why we're making this film

Mutual aid invites us to believe in our potential to care for one another rather than needing to control one another. This reorientation has deep impacts on what we expect from each other and the world we dare to build.

This series aims to:

  • deepen conversations around what mutual aid means in organizing work;
  • provide insight into how mutual aid-based projects are structured and function;
  • inspire more communities to begin and mature mutual aid-based projects; and
  • encourage more grassroots visual media that documents what communities are learning.

Countering power systems leading us toward collapse, The Elements of Mutual Aid will show that another world is not only necessary and possible, but already exists and is growing.

meet the crew

Payton McDonald

Co-director, sound designer, & co-editor

Payton is a 30-year-old Black Anarchist. He’s worked nationally alongside the Mutual Aid Disaster Relief Network (MADR), traveling and facilitating workshops across Turtle Island to brainstorm solutions for a world beyond nation-states. He spent several years living out of a backpack while visiting organizers, farmers, and communes across the US, studying the ways that autonomous communities can function. He’s mobilized against fascism in the streets, and has poured his spirit into place-making projects at home.

Leah Ayer

Co-director, director of photography, & co-editor

Leah is a photographer and community organizer who has documented the work of various mutual aid-based projects and organizations, including the development of the Hurricane Harvey relief organization West Street Recovery and the organizing work of the The Popular Indigenous Council of Oaxaca in Oaxaca, Mexico. Through participating in mutual aid-based organizations and supporting emerging groups, they’ve grown an understanding of how efforts struggle and flourish.

In Association Partners

The Elements of Mutual Aid is proud to be supported by the following businesses and collectives:

If your business/collective shares similar values with this project and wants to join this list of partners, please reach to us out at elementsofmutualaid@proton.me.

You can learn more about what an In Association production credit with this project means here