Lightening the Load: Public Assistance and Its Relationship with Mutual Aid

Abstract

For poor communities in the United States, mutual aid, informal contributions to the community, have an outsized effect in improving access to resources and creating economic mobility. Mutual aid can manifest as care provided for others, helping with errands, and any peer-to-peer act contained within the community. Public Assistance may play an understudied role in encouraging these mutual aid behaviors by reducing the cognitive load, or amount of stress, by providing households with a lifeline of permanent support. By using a linear probability model and controlling for various key demographic and socioeconomic factors from the literature (income, marital status, age, religion, etc.), we can observe the relationship that public assistance has with these behaviors. We find a positive correlation between SNAP and TANF funding and mutual aid. While statistically significant, their contribution is modest. Public Assistance shows the strongest correlation in relation to giving non-monetary forms of mutual aid than with financial contributions. Further research is required to validate these findings and determine their efficacy for creating policy.