Dean Spade is an organizer, writer and teacher. Read the latest updates, learn about his books, read his other writing, and watch videos. Learn more about Dean.
Welcome
Featured Videos
Shit’s Totally FUCKED! What Can We Do?: A Mutual Aid Explainer by Dean Spade and Ciro Carillo
When We Win We Lose: Mainstreaming and the Redistribution of Respectability, 2016 Kessler Award Speech
Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back
Queer Liberation: No Prisons, No Borders
News
New Book! Out January, Pre-Order Now
My new book will be out January 14, 2025! Around the globe, people are faced with spiraling crises, from the pandemic and climate change-induced disasters to the ongoing horrors of mass incarceration, genocide, racist policing, endemic gender violence, and severe wealth inequality. More and more of us feel mobilized to fight back, often dedicating our …
New Tool: Cultivating Solidarity in Times of Escalating Repression
I’ve been working on this new tool about how to respond to escalating repression without falling into classic anti-solidarity traps with Community Justice Exchange, Jocelyn Simonson, PIlar Weiss, Atara Rich-Shea and Zohra Ahmed since last year, and we’re excited to share it! You can find the entire tool at bit.ly/cultivatesolidarity. Check out the video from …
Continue reading “New Tool: Cultivating Solidarity in Times of Escalating Repression”
New Essay about Criminalization of Mutual Aid and #StopCopCity
It was a pleasure to work with the Atlanta Press Collective on this piece about the history and contemporary realities of the criminalization of mutual aid, in light of the indictment of 61 forest defenders working to stop the construction of a new police training facility in Atlanta.
Featured Project
Mutual Aid Toolbox
Conditions are already disastrous and getting worse under the new presidential administration. This new Mutual Aid Toolbox is a collection of tools for creating mutual aid projects to help each other survive the brutal realities of poverty, criminalization, immigration enforcement, racism, ablism and violence, and building the world we want to live in where everyone has everything we need. The site has hundreds of projects and tools for starting projects that we need right now.
Mutual aid is a term to describe people giving each other needed material support, trying to resist the control dynamics, hierarchies and system-affirming, oppressive arrangements of charity and social services. 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.
Image credit: Seth Tobocman.