This week, as the Office of Alumni Relations and Annual Giving geared up for its biggest fundraising day of the year, another group on campus put out a call for donations. After over a year of dormancy, Polar Bear Mutual Aid (PBMA) relaunched its operations this week with an Instagram post soliciting donations and support requests from staff, students and faculty at the College.

While not a registered club, PBMA is led by Bowdoin students seeking to redistribute funds and other resources to members of the Bowdoin community in need of support. In previous years, PBMA has helped staff, students and faculty cover emergency healthcare costs, travel back home and other unexpected expenses. Organizers expressed their desire to continue this work by leveraging the wealth of an institution like Bowdoin to meet community needs.

“Even though Bowdoin can feel like a bubble, geographically and socially, it’s not economically uniform, and there’s a lot of wealth disparity. Some students might have a lot of disposable income, while others are working jobs to pay bills or support their families back home,” Rima Alsafarjlani ’27, one of the organizers of PBMA, said.

For Alsafarjlani, PBMA serves as a reminder of the values the College community aims to live out both on and off campus.

“I think that this is a community that genuinely cares about one another, we learn a lot about the common good…, and mutual aid feels like a way to live out those values and practice and to leverage the resources that exist [at Bowdoin] so that everyone can take care of their needs while they’re here,” Alsafarjlani said.

Organizers of PBMA described the initiative as comprising two main parts—a channel for donations and a channel for support requests. Members of the Bowdoin community seeking financial support from PBMA will fill out a form specifying the dollar amount of their request, the purpose of their request and its urgency. One organizer is tasked with anonymizing support requests on a spreadsheet. A separate group of organizers will then sort these anonymized requests by urgency, fulfilling them from most to least urgent.

“We make decisions purely based on how much we have and the urgency of the request we have received,” Cedar Greve ’26, another organizer of PBMA, said.

Right now, PBMA is accepting both donations and support requests. But in the future, organizers floated the possibility of setting aside dedicated periods for fundraising to meet urgent requests more quickly.

Built on themes of reciprocity and community care, mutual aid is a practice that redistributes resources within a community to those facing immediate need. Proponents of the practice, including PBMA’s leadership, stress that mutual aid and charity are not the same.

“I think of mutual aid as more horizontal, and I think it’s based on the idea that we’re all interdependent and that these roles can shift. So you might donate one month, but then the next month you might request. It’s about recognizing this shared responsibility we have for each other and building community in the present,” Alsafarjlani said.

Organizers also emphasized that while PBMA is run by students, staff and faculty are included in the group’s redistributive efforts.

“[Bowdoin is a] multibillion dollar institution that we know is not paying its workers a living wage,” Greve said. “[This OneDay] we believe, specifically for alumni that are looking to give back to this community in line with the values of the common good they were taught, that their money could be better used to directly support members of this community that are actively in need of support.”

The organizers acknowledged that mutual aid is not a solution to deep-rooted problems of financial inequality.

“Mutual aid is not a substitute for this disparity, but I think it’s a way for community members to show up for one another in the meantime,” Alsafarjlani said.

While PBMA is currently focused solely on redistributing financial support, organizers articulated future visions of building community through the exchange of other services, such as offering rides, tutoring or clothing alterations. In previous years at Bowdoin, PBMA has hosted ‘everything swaps’ where community members could exchange unwanted clothing and artwork free of charge.

“For now, we’re focused on financial redistribution, because that’s the most immediate need, but our broader vision imagines this community where people share their skills and resources more broadly,” Alsafarjlani said. “That’s the direction we would like to go towards—a vision of support that doesn’t always have to be monetary.”