Benefit society
The modern legal system essentially requires all such organizations of appreciable size to incorporate one of these forms or another to continue to exist on an ongoing basis.
Benefits may include financial security or assistance for education, unemployment, birth of a baby, sickness and medical expenses, retirement, and funerals.
[citation needed] Peter Kropotkin posited early in the 20th century that mutual aid affiliations predate human culture and are as much a factor in evolution as is the "survival of the fittest" concept.
Insurance companies, religious charities, credit unions, and democratic governments now perform many of the same functions that were once the purview of ethnically- or culturally-affiliated mutual benefit associations.
[citation needed] In modern Asia rotating credit associations organized within communities or workplaces were widespread through the early twentieth century and continue in our time.
[5] Habitat for Humanity in the United States is a leading example of shared credit and labor pooled to help low-income people afford adequate housing.
Ad hoc mutual aid associations have been seen organized among strangers facing shared challenges in such disparate settings as the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival in New York in 1969, during the Beijing Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, for neighborhood defense during the Los Angeles Riots of 1992, and work of the organization Common Ground Collective which formed in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
The Rainbow Family organizes gatherings in National Forests of the United States each year around age-old models of ad hoc mutual aid.
"Fraternals" provide members with life insurance and other financial protection benefits following state law and use the earnings to fund member-supported community activities.
The term "fraternal" can properly be applied to such an association, for the reason that the pursuit of a common object, calling, or profession usually tends to create a brotherly feeling among those who are thus engaged.
Their work is at the same time of a beneficial and fraternal character because they aim to improve the condition of a class of persons who are engaged in a common pursuit and to unite them by a stronger bond of sympathy and interest.
[12] More than 80 fraternal benefit societies are operating in the United States and Canada today, with over 9 million members[20] and with $380 billion of life insurance in force.
