By Maksim Grinbgerg
Brooklyn’s culture of mutual support isn’t new. It’s one of the oldest things about the borough. Long before anyone used words like “nonprofit” or “mutual aid,” Brooklyn’s neighborhoods were running on networks of people helping people — immigrant aid societies, congregation-based charities, settlement houses, benevolent associations formed block by block by communities that had arrived with little and built support structures from scratch.
That history matters because it explains why giving here feels so native. Wave after wave of newcomers — from across Europe, the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia, the American South — landed in Brooklyn and, again and again, organized to take care of their own and then their neighbors. The institutions changed names and forms over the decades, but the underlying habit never broke. Brooklyn has always been a place where residents take responsibility for the people around them.
You can still see that tradition everywhere, just in modern dress: the food pantries, the literacy nonprofits, the volunteer-run gardens and tutoring programs. They’re the latest chapter in a very long story.
I think of my own support for local nonprofits as a small part of that continuity — one resident, among countless others past and present, choosing to back the organizations doing good work in the borough. None of us invents this tradition; we inherit it, and the job is to keep it going. Brooklyn’s spirit of community support has lasted this long precisely because each generation decided it was worth carrying forward.