Something old is new again: mutual aid and the Tennessee Office of Minority Health.

This article is the result of inquiries and ethnographic encounters over a 15-year period, with the governmental agency known as the Tennessee Office of Minority Health (TOMH), a division of the Tennessee Department of Health. This article concerns the innovative and participatory response of TOMH to support African American health in Tennessee. For the purposes of this article, an innovative and participatory response to alleviate any form of human suffering is defined as mutual aid. How TOMH uses mutual aid will be considered. The intent of this article is to show that mutual aid has historic roots in African American communities and the Black Church. Yet today, government agencies like TOMH use mutual aid to create outputs-altering processes that support health and redress health needs for African American communities.