The specificities of associative aid and its partial connexion with welfare state in the French-speaking Swiss context imply the joint implementation of social policies, combining complementarities and tensions. Based on an ethnography of an aid association, this article questions the plurality of aid and the issues of responsibility that lie behind it, ranging from unconditional emergency aid to the professional integration, considering the coexistence of different logics of action. The analysis of different aids, in individual or collective social intervention, shows how the issues of making beneficiaries responsible and autonomous are manifested in the very practice of social work.