Mutual Aid Networks Editing and Proofreading Services

Mutual aid is organised around a claim that the language of the charitable sector cannot express: that the people giving and the people receiving are the same people, at different moments. Borrow the vocabulary of services and beneficiaries and the thing stops being mutual aid within a month, because everyone can tell who is now the helper and who is now the helped. The writing is not decoration on the politics; it is the mechanism by which the relationship is either maintained or quietly converted into charity with a different logo.

We edit what mutual aid groups, solidarity networks and grassroots collectives produce — request and offer forms, group principles and points of unity, onboarding material for new participants, WhatsApp and signal group guidelines, safeguarding and boundaries guidance written for volunteers with no training, conflict and accountability processes, data and privacy practice for informal groups, leaflets and doorstep material, fundraising and solidarity fund documentation, statements and public communications, relationships and agreements with formal organisations, and handover documentation when organisers step back. Our editors work in the register your group has chosen and do not professionalise it.

The request form is where mutual aid either stays mutual or does not. A form asking someone to describe their need, their circumstances and why they cannot manage has recreated an application for assistance, and the people most committed to the politics of the thing will be the ones least willing to fill it in. We write these so the request is short and specific — what is needed, when, and where — with no field asking for justification; so the form asks in the same breath what the person can offer, at any point, in any form, because that single question is what keeps the relationship symmetrical and it costs one line; so nothing collects data the group has no ability to protect; and so the wording avoids the vocabulary of eligibility entirely. Where a group genuinely has to ration something scarce, we write that as a group decision about scarcity rather than as an assessment of individuals, because the second is a service and the first is still mutual aid.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including material about people in the network. We are editors rather than legal, safeguarding or organising advisers, and we offer no view on your group's politics, structure or any decision it makes. What we can do is make the writing clear and consistent with what the group says it is.