About

Our History

Logan Square Mutual Aid is a group of neighbors helping neighbors. In the midst of global pandemics, recessions, and mass migration, we are keenly aware that the most effective thing we can do is to be there for each other.

Logan Square Mutual Aid is part of a city-wide mutual aid effort, organized neighborhood by neighborhood. We live in Logan Square (and beyond), and when the coronavirus broke out in Chicago, we began to look for ways to contribute what we could to our neighbors. We have worked together to support each other through economic, health, and other hardships. We have been organizing in our community for 5 years as of spring 2025.

Our Work

We strive to support the community in fulfilling immediate essential needs. We distribute food to families every week, support a neighborhood free store, offer prescription or grocery pickups, provide reimbursement for expenses, and share resources with anyone who reaches out for help. Meet your neighbors—we care about you!

As an all-volunteer organization, we respond to outreach as we are able. If you don’t hear back immediately, it’s because we’re not available. We don’t have the capacity to provide urgent support but try to be as responsive as possible (days not weeks).

Chicagoland Food Sovereignty Coalition

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Logan Square Mutual Aid works with Chicago Food Sovereignty Coalition. CFSC is a coalition of autonomous mutual aid groups working to reimagine a resilient, sustainable and equitable local food system based on food sovereignty. The pandemic vividly revealed how broken the national, regional and local food systems are. These systems are predicated on over-industrialized foods, waste, profit, and food apartheid. Such brutal and fragile systems are not sustainable, and for too long have been managed by power brokers and policy makers, instead of everyday people, many who don’t have access to healthy and nutritious food.

We are working to build a food system rooted in radical love rather than profit, unlocking abundance for all people. We operate under the fiscal sponsorship of the Hack Club, which is a 501C-3 committed to growing the solidarity economy.

What is Mutual Aid?

Here is the definition of mutual aid from the Big Door Brigade, a website started by activists in Seattle, Washington to lift up mutual aid as a strategy for survival and mobilization:

“Mutual aid is when people get together to meet each other’s basic survival needs with a shared understanding that the systems we live under are not going to meet our needs and we can do it together RIGHT NOW! Mutual aid projects are a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions, not just through symbolic acts or putting pressure on their representatives in government, but by actually building new social relations that are more survivable. Most mutual aid projects are volunteer-based, with people jumping in to participate because they want to change what is going on right now, not wait to convince corporations or politicians to do the right thing.”

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3 Key Elements of Mutual Aid

In “Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next),” Dean Spade details three key elements of mutual aid:

Mutual aid projects work to meet survival needs and build shared understanding about why people do not have what they need.
Mutual aid projects mobilize people, expand solidarity, and build movements.
Mutual aid projects are participatory, solving problems through collective action rather than waiting for saviors.

Read the book here.

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