“Outside trauma [of living in a society that is oppressive and dystopian] needs to be rebuffed with care inside the movement” Sara- Tipping Point Workshop

In a world that wants us to be individuals, care and connection is a radical act. Sacrificing our mental and physical wellbeing for the cause is not prefigurative, and does not help anyone. We need to practice the collective care and wellbeing that we want to see in the world in our movement spaces. “Care shifts movement organising from extractivism to interdependence.” acaciathorns.substack.com/p/our-movements-need-care

Collective care makes campaigning more sustainable in the long term and helps avoid the typical boom bust cycle or organising, prevents burn out, and is essential to build strong, resilient groups.

In your group you can create a shared understanding of what collective care means to you and how you want to practice it. Is an iterative practice that needs to be implemented and reworked continually as your group and the political situation evolves.

“The more you practice caring for each other, the harder it will be for the state to infiltrate, disrupt and destroy the collective via repressive tactics.” wokescientist.substack.com/p/community-care-and-relationship-building

Care is reproductive work and as such, when it is present, is often still gendered and racialised peoples labour within our movement spaces. Collective care is everyone’s responsibility and in-particular cis-men should be encouraged to take on these responsibilities.

“Care is essential for people from marginalised communities to even be part of the movement.” acaciathorns.substack.com/p/our-movements-need-care

Collective care is

• Building space for rest, reflection and addressing conflict
• Good decision making processes
• Building trust
• reciprocal relationships
• building connections and community with other groups within the movement
• mentoring/skill and knowledge sharing
• Sharing/ roles so that people don’t get burnt out and people have the opportunity to learn new skills in different roles.
• Opportunities for people with different skills and abilities to be involve.
• Intervening to prevent hierarchies, understanding how social capital creates hierarchies
• Avoid creating our own hierarchies between those who can take direct action and organise full time and those who cannot.
• Creating and implementing a safe(r) spaces policy.
• Procedures for welcoming new people and sharing the relevant knowledge and skills so that they are able to fully participate in the group
• Understanding trauma and the different ways it shows up in our spaces and how our spaces can cause it.
• Space to be be soft, to be struggling, grieve, or having a bad day
• Space to show up as your self, where all the parts of your self are welcomed and celebrated.
• Conflict resolution practices
• understanding a empathy for peoples different situations
• Engaging in anti-opressive learning together
• Creating and implementing a safe(r) spaces policy.
• Understand and implement security culture
• Debriefing after events/actions
• Having space for fun/social activities between events/actions
• Accessibility
  • Child care/child friendly meeting times
  • mask
  • language
  • spaces
  • asking and supporting peoples different needs to access and safety
  • ways to navigate systemic barriers to participation
  • various events and ways to get involved
• Mutual aid – sharing finances, support with housing, and other basic needs
  • clothing swaps, shared meals, financing travel and internet connection.
• mapping resources
• Being friends outside of the group
• supporting each others everyday life struggles outside of movement spaces
• Celebrating the positive, peoples and groups wins and wider movement success
• Sharing progress updates for how the group is doing with wider support base
• 1:1 check ins
• Inviting/creating rituals
• clear roles, objectives, values
• Create a wellness first approach. If someone in your group is needing more support, more time to check-in or having a hard time inside or outside of the group that becomes the groups first priority. If we are struggling and unsupported then we cannot give our all to the movement.

In meetings

• Good facilitation
• Honouring peoples time and not going over time
• Games – fun, keep people engaged
• Meeting in different spaces like community gardens
• Social time
• breaks
• Creating time for checking in that does not leave the rest of the meeting feeling rushed (increasing the sense of urgency and raising anxiety and cortisol levels).
• Sharing food

When we don’t have ways to rest, to recover, and to find joy, our we lose our ability to cope with any form of challenge or difference. Our bodies are tired, and our minds begin to understand disagreement or difference as a threat. It is in these moments that disagreements fester into conflict – and that conflict is hard to navigate through when we simply don’t have the capacity to engage with it. So often, these conflicts result our movements falling apart. acaciathorns.substack.com/p/our-movements-need-care

This post was written with collective knowledge from a Tipping Point workshop