This is something we as radicals don’t talk about much but which has come up a lot in my experience:

You deserve mutual aid. You’re not too privileged for it, you’re not stealing it from people who need it more - you have a right to use community resources just as much as anyone else

I’ve seen food rot, clothes and books be forgotten in storage, because the people volunteering at or supporting these projects don’t think the resources are for them. Then those same volunteers will go out and put money they don’t have into the capitalist system to buy the resources they could’ve gotten for free

You’re thinking like a charity. You’re drawing a line between the people giving resources and the people taking them, which inevitably leads to a feeling of separation and eventually superiority, unconsciously seeing yourself as a savior coming in and helping the less fortunate. That alienates the people you’re helping from you, and results in neither side fully recognizing the other as human and the same as them

There’s a reason we say “solidarity not charity”. There’s a reason mutual aid is called mutual. Because by lifting each other up, we all become stronger. In solidarity and mutual aid, there is no separation between giver and receiver, because everyone involved is benefited by it

But that doesn’t happen if the resources aren’t used! Get out of the capitalist scarcity mindset - give freely and take freely, because by being lifted up you help us all