Jalili, JalehHaacke, Matthew W.2025-05-222025-05-222025-05-05https://hdl.handle.net/1911/118357Through ethnographic fieldwork and interviews (n=13), this study examines how Food Not Bombs Houston (FNBH) operates as a social movement through mutual aid. I explore how FNBH fosters community, deploys horizontal leadership, and engages in direct action to prefigure a better world. My findings demonstrate how FNBH’s food-sharing practices and mutual aid serve as a repertoire of contention, actively disrupting capitalist structures and resisting state control through spatial occupation. By fostering community resilience through a decentralized, non-hierarchical, consensus-based organizational model, FNBH embodies prefigurative politics—creating alternative systems of care outside of traditional non-profit structures and state control. This analysis challenges traditional social movement scholarship by demonstrating how mutual aid operates not just as a direct service but as a long-term form of resistance through everyday acts of solidarity.en-USExcept where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. Permission to reuse, publish, or reproduce the work beyond the terms of the license or beyond the bounds of fair use or other exemptions to copyright law must be obtained from the copyright holderReportsocial movementsmutual aidurban spacepublic spacehorizontal leadershipprefigurative politicscommunity resistancehomelessnesspolitical sociologyhttps://doi.org/10.25611/j3x9-ct97