Community Care in the AIDS Crisis

For JSTOR Daily News I wrote reflected on the surge in mutual aid work that exploded in the first year of Covid in the U.S. and connected back to the AIDS crisis. Shanti Project, to me, was a clear example of what communities supporting one another are capable of doing in the darkest times. Shanti Project’s work in caring for people with AIDS provides valuable lessons in the efficacy of mutual aid in fighting disease. It provides a thumbnail view of the many services Shanti offered to people living with AIDS in the city of San Francisco. I trace both the Covid related mutual aid and Shanti’s AIDS response to longer histories of both intellectual and praxis of mutual aid, like the Catholic Worker movement and Hull House.