Good morning. For Thanksgiving weekend, we set out to research the long history of mutual aid, and how neighbours helping neighbours can make the world better. More on that below, plus more ceasefire updates from the Middle East. But first:

• Israelis and Palestinians celebrate in the streets after Hamas signs a ceasefire deal with Israel
• Top Carney minister and officials remain in Washington to pursue trade talks
• An audit finds the federal Indigenous procurement program lacks robust fraud detection

Good morning. I’m Erin Anderssen, the happiness reporter at The Globe and Mail.

Last weekend, I watched the “based-on-a-true-story” movie The Lost Bus, which stars Matthew McConaughey and America Ferrera. They play, respectively, a down-on-his-luck bus driver and a plucky teacher, trying to save young students trapped in the very real fire that destroyed the California town of Paradise in 2018. In one particularly tense scene, Ferrera goes searching alone for water and barely escapes an armed gang of would-be bus hijackers.

And I instantly thought: That never happened.

At the time, I was writing a story on mutual aid, a term that sums up humanity’s long history of helping each other. This neighbourly altruism features prominently in religions and philosophy as the glue that holds societies together.

We saw it most clearly during the pandemic, when Canadians organized to deliver food and supplies to their fellow residents, providing nimble and flexible care where charities and governments could not – or would not. This is still happening around the country. One of the largest mutual aid groups is in Winnipeg. They don’t receive government funding, and they have no paid staff members.

Mutual aid goes back a long way, and as Sara Horowitz points out in her book Mutualism, these grassroots efforts have contributed to major social change, including the fight for racial and LGBTQ equality. Even if it starts with a simple solution to local problem, she suggests, mutual aid can grow to have a larger impact on the issues we face today. “We’ve already been solving our own problems,” Ms. Horowitz writes, “and each of us has more agency than we think we do.”

What’s more, helping each other makes us happy, and gives life meaning, as I discussed with Nicolas Parent, a part-time professor at the University of Ottawa who is working on a book about mutual aid. And yet, in these individualistic times we get anxious about being in debt to each other.

But why? An exchange of favours is the very definition of a healthy community.

And by the way, I was right about the movie. In real life, those villainous neighbours that America Ferrera encounters never existed. According to a detailed account by Washington Post reporter Lizzie Johnson, who wrote the book on which the movie was based, what really happened is that more than one resident willingly shared their water with the children during that deadly California wildfire – the kind of selfless generosity recorded in disaster research around the world.

If we based our understanding of humanity on the scary-human trope in disaster movies, the nasty discourse of certain politicians and the clickbait temper tantrum videos on social media, we would have little faith in our own species.

The people I am meeting through my happiness beat suggest just the opposite. This Thanksgiving, I will be thinking about Rae Gunn and Dana Tucker Khan, volunteers with the Winnipeg Mutual Aid Society, who respond to requests from families short on money to buy food.

“What we really try to emphasize in this group is that you absolutely have something to give, whether it’s time or companionship,” Tucker Khan told me. “Everyone’s rich in some way.”

Today, we need each other more than ever. I’ve been inspired by this story to intentionally look for simple acts of mutual kindness and compassion. And once you start looking, you see them everywhere, evidence that we can indeed count on each other.

This is the point that Rebbeca Solnit makes over and over again in her fantastic book, A Paradise Built in Hell. One line from her book sticks with me still: “Were we to know and believe this, our sense of what is possible at any time might change.”

Israelis and Palestinians alike rejoiced after the ceasefire deal was announced. The agreement to cease fire and free Israeli hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners is the first phase of U.S. President Donald Trump’s initiative to end the two-year war.

Also read

• A Canadian whose parents’ remains were held hostage in Gaza, says she hopes those who killed them and other Canadian victims will be prosecuted.
• Hamas wants Marwan Barghouti freed in prisoner exchange, but Israel so far refuses
• Analysis: The G