Mutual Causality and the Limits of the Logic Model
Last week I wrote about protest and care in Minneapolis activating together, each making the other possible. There is a name for that. It comes from a Buddhist systems theorist named Joanna Macy. She called it mutual causality.
I want to explain what that means, because I think it explains what I am seeing.
What I Keep Seeing
In spring 2020, COVID and the murder of George Floyd hit Minneapolis at the same time. Grocery stores in South Minneapolis were damaged during the uprising and communities organized out of necessity. People set up food deliveries, distributed supplies, held neighborhood meetings, passed around Venmo handles on street corners. Volunteer-run mutual aid sites merged and scaled quickly. Neighborhood groups raised six figures in their first year. A bus stop at George Floyd Square turned into a permanent place to get clothes. Signal groups popped up connecting neighbors who had never talked before.
Then the immediate crisis passed. But the networks did not dissolve. People held onto phone numbers. Signal groups went silent but nobody left them. Relationships that formed under pressure stayed intact under calm.
Daniel Cueto-Villalobos, a University of Minnesota doctoral candidate who studies race, religion, and social movements and lives in South Minneapolis, has described how 2020 “forced us to talk to each other in the most basic sense, and get together as a community to develop these networks that we see really playing out today.”
In December 2025, the federal government sent more than 2,000 ICE agents into Minnesota. What followed was not people starting from scratch. It was people reopening group chats, texting contacts from five years ago, showing up at the same places they had shown up before. Networks that had been dormant reactivated because they had never actually been taken apart.
The scale now is enormous and mostly uncounted. Signal groups with hundreds of members coordinate in real time, some splitting into multiple channels because the volume is too high for one. School communities have raised tens of thousands of dollars through informal networks. Volunteers have moved more than 200,000 diapers through schools, faith groups, and mutual aid contacts. Grocery stores deliver free to families who will not leave home. Restaurant workers cover for each other, driving coworkers who cannot safely take the bus. Donors connect to families through QR codes taped to tables at school events.
No one designed this. No funder launched it. No nonprofit manages it. And yet by almost any measure of community wellbeing, it is working.
Why the Logic Model Cannot Explain This
I am an evaluator. If I tried to draw what happened in Minneapolis as a logic model, I could not do it. There is no input that leads to the output of 50,000 people marching in minus 20 degrees. There is no theory of change that predicts Signal chats blanketing a city in weeks. There is no causal arrow that connects a teenager recording a murder on her phone in 2020 to hundreds of thousands of diapers distributed in 2026.
The logic model assumes linear causality. One thing leads to another. Input, activity, output, outcome, impact. Arrow, arrow, arrow.
What happened in Minneapolis is not linear. It is a web of conditions activating together: decades of organizing history, a climate that requires interdependence, the murders of George Floyd and Jamar Clark and Philando Castile and Thurman Blevins and Daunte Wright, anger that never fully subsided, care that went dormant but not dead, trust built in crisis and maintained in quiet, new neighbors and old organizers finding each other, winter itself. No single cause produced this. No single arrow points from here to there. Everything conditioned everything else, and when the moment demanded it, everything activated together.
There Is a Name for This
In 1991, Joanna Macy, a systems theorist and Buddhist practitioner, published a book called Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory. She had noticed something that struck her as extraordinary: two traditions, separated by millennia and methodology, had arrived at the same insight.
The Buddhist teaching of dependent origination holds that nothing arises independently. Everything emerges from a web of conditions. When conditions are sufficient, the thing arises. Not because one thing caused it, but because everything was ready.
General systems theory says the same thing with different language. Feedback loops. Emergence. Non-linear dynamics. Complex systems produce outcomes that cannot be predicted from any single input.
Macy called the shared insight mutual causality. Things do not cause each other in a straight line. They arise together. They condition each other. They co-create.
This is not mysticism. This is how complex systems actually work. And it is exactly what I am watching happen in my city.
What This Means
No one wrote a grant for what Minneapolis built. No one designed a logic model. The infrastructure is a neighbor with a Venmo and a Signal chat and a car full of diapers, and it is more effective than most of what our field designs on purpose.
If we want to understand what actually works, we have to stop looking for causes and start looking for conditions. The question is not “what intervention produced this result.” The question is “what conditions allowed this to emerge.” That is a different question entirely, and it requires a different kind of evaluation, one that looks for soil rather than seeds, for webs rather than arrows, for readiness rather than inputs.
Our field does not have a framework for this yet. Buddhism does. Systems theory does. Minneapolis is living it. Maybe it is time we caught up.
Minnesota’s roots have always survived under ice. What activated them was not a program. It was everything, all at once, together.
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