Charity Not Solidarity: COVID-19 and the Non-Profitization of Mutual Aid in Canada

In this article, I critically theorize my lived experiences with cofounding The People’s Pantry (TPP), a Toronto-based mutual aid project formed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic by racialized queer, trans, and women organizers. Drawing attention to how TPP was slowly cooptated from within, I apply the concepts of Non-Profitization, Social Death, and Grievable Death to explain TPP’s trajectory as both racialized and systematic. I argue that COVID-19 originally created a fluidified climate of deracialized social death that enabled mutual aid to not only punctuate, but dominate, the whitestream. This, in turn, prompted an unprecedented influx of monied white Canadians to join the counterpublic praxis. These volunteers joined mutual aid groups, such as TPP, and fought for our ethos of transformative justice right after COVID-19 struck but ultimately abandoned the ethic when presented with the opportunity to go back to “normal”. Yet at the same time, many of these volunteers remained active in mutual aid and continued to participate in the movement. As such, they slowly infused mutual aid with the hierarchical logics of charity practices, thus promoting its non-profitization from within. Observing the harmful impacts that this has had on TPP, I conclude by cautioning other racialized queer, trans, and women organizers against uncritically welcoming monied white people into our transformative justice spaces immediately following the onset of a severe crisis.