ABOUT US
Our Mission
Marronage Mutual Aid provides microgrants, emergency housing, and land-sharing for tiny homes in the Northeast, advancing a solidarity praxis where students and organizers are not left with deferred dreams.
Our Vision
We envision a world with a robust housing safety net that empowers students and organizers to secure the skills for meaningful employment and to drive society toward greater justice.
Our Story
In 2021, we launched a mutual aid project that was antiracist, anticapitalist, and abolitionist to support students and families excluded by the CUNY system. Over three years, we stood alongside students navigating domestic violence, homelessness, hunger, and systemic discrimination.
Liberation is not a dream but a practice.
Together, we are building the spaces our community has been searching for.
What began as a grassroots resource-sharing and microgranting project became a powerful lesson in the failures of current systems—failures of the charity model—and the potential of the community.
One experience crystallized this need. In 2020, a Black, disabled student faced eviction from his dorm, with no family or safety net to support him. While we fought the administration for his and all displaced students’ housing rights, he was ultimately forced into the shelter system—until our community stepped in. Through crowdfunding, we secured the deposit he needed for long-term housing, proving that collective solidarity could succeed where institutions fail.
His story inspired Marronage Mutual Aid—a project to meet urgent needs while imagining a freer future.
Our Values
Solidarity
We stand shoulder to shoulder with all communities championing justice as we confront intersecting supremacies.
Innovation
We continually seek innovative solutions, adapting to address the ever-evolving needs of our students, organizers and communities.
Ease
We approach our work with boundless empathy and compassion, acknowledging our students and organizers' unique challenges, and striving to eliminate unnecessary hurdles.
Sustainability
We are resolutely committed to creating sustainable solutions, exemplified by our pioneering tiny house projects, to ensure long-term housing stability.
Safety
We believe students and organizers deserve bodily, emotional, financial and mental safety.
Our Core Beliefs
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"Nobody's free until everybody's free.”
-Fannie Lou HamerOur commitment to building a world that is about the liberation of all from systems of domination. We must attend to the ways that those systems operate within us and within our organizations and enterprises, or else we risk replicating the very things we are working to transform. We commit to addressing the harm created by systemic oppression, including the ways we and our communities are both harmed by and benefit from dominance, privilege, and oppression. We understand this work takes place on a scale from the local and interpersonal level to that of global networks.
- Borrowed from Solidarity Economy
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Mutual aid is the radical act of caring for each other while working to change the intersecting supremacies of the world.
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We believe that much of our trauma—both interpersonal and systemic—stems from racial and colonial capitalism, interconnected systems built on the exploitation of natural resources and marginalized racial communities in the U.S. and globally. Dismantling these systems is essential. Our work takes a step toward breaking this cycle by fostering community-centered alternatives rooted in justice.
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Kali Akuno, one of the founders of Cooperation Jackson, a radical experiment in black liberation in Jackson Mississippi, said in order to seriously upend white supremacy and racialized capitalism on a city and national level we have to be willing to experiment on a huge scale, like the white capitalists have been doing for centuries. This project is working towards continuous experimentation.