Across time and geographical space, marginalised mothers have mobilised to support their families and communities through joint action and support networks. These groups ahve often developed initiatives, based on what Patricia Hill Collins has called 'A politics of survival', rooted in radical care and situated knowledge through a theorizing of experience. This involves the recognition of vital but underappreciated strategies for enduring precarious worlds. Drawing on examples from anti-racist single mother organising, liberatory educational practice and welfare rights activism in the UK, this paper will maintain that social work practice can learn from relational approaches that nurture autonomy through care rather than punishment. Through the lens of feminist relational approaches, it presents an alternative framework, or an 'otherwise', for the development of services and interventions that aim to promote self-sufficiency and autonomy.