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Mutual-aid agreements (MAAs) codify how agencies share resources. It may sound simple, but these standard documents are far more important than the basic definition implies and are not as “standard” as you might think. The MAA is a legal covenant, a promise between neighbors, a community’s pledge to another that says, “We will be there for you.”
MAAs epitomize the civil society that French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville saw as unique to the United States when traveling around the country in the early-1800s. His study of social conditions in his classic “Democracy in America” brought to light the premise that individuals, families, villages and towns working together were the grassroots of a new social order. He saw it manifest in churches, service groups, fire brigades and militias where freedom, safety and welfare were ensured more by small communities than by bureaucrats in distant capitals…
