I still don’t get the hesitations, I genuinely can’t relate. Framing a $200 grocery request as a risk that someone will just blow it on fast food is a pretty harmful stereotype. For one, $200 is a very real, standard monthly grocery budget in much of the world, including here in Indonesia. But more importantly, when we hold onto the fear that poor people won’t stretch funds “responsibly,” we end up withholding help from people who are genuinely just trying to survive the month. Why would anyone police poor people’s performance of poverty as if there’s a manual for how to be poor correctly? Mutual aid asks us to let go of that need to control the recipient. Your response does explain the donor logic of charity well though, which is what mutual aid isn’t about.
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Agree it’s probably a harmful stereotype, I simply gave that as an example because it was an experience I had that kind of left me feeling used when it became clear over time what was happening. In that situation it wasn’t that I had set out a desire to police that person’s behavior but after observing it for a long time I felt like I was simply sacrificing from my family’s needs to enable behavior I didn’t agree with. Maybe it’s not my place to judge but we are talking about money I worked for and a decision I have to make about how best to use it. In this situation I decided it was better to use it to help my parents rather than that person. But that’s just one experience that I was generalizing to say maybe this is a part of the answer to your question, idk.
These sorts of mental equations are often under the surface when people have to decide things in the moment and it’s not always a clear, explicit chain of thoughts that leads up to the decision to help in one scenario but not another.