We are living through a moment full of contradictions: all around the world, we are bearing witness to brutal violence, repression, and attacks on our civil liberties - and yet we are also undeniably experiencing a moment of resurgence and revitalization in organizing. From student activism for Palestine, to movements for racial justice, to the climate movement, activists and organizers are coming together to fight for a fairer, safer, and more inclusive society.

Engaging in organizing gives us glimpses of the better world we all deserve but it can also be very depleting: whether we face backlash and repression, emotional and physical exhaustion, or the pressure of balancing activism with other responsibilities. Sustainign this level of political engagement is difficult both on personal and collective level. The series aimed to address these pressing questions:

• How can we counter the tendency to burn-out and instead build resilient organizing?

• How can we attend to our personal and collective needs while remaining active and politically engaged?

• How can we center care as a force for political action?

Through this series, participants explored these questions with leaders from community organizing, academia, and mental health fields. 

The Collective Care Workshop Series consisted of four online workshops held between June and September 2024. Hosted by experts in community organizing, academia, and mental health, each session offered a mix of theorical insights and practical approaches.

Each workshop included:

• A webinar session lead by guest speakers.

• An optional follow-up reflection session where participants engaged with peers globally to deepen their understanding.

I. The Transformative Potential of Political Emotions

Date: Saturday, 22 June 2024

Humans pride themselves on being rational: logical thinking and intelligence are commonly viewed as separate from and superior to emotionality. Yet emotions determine our judgement, our behaviour, our health, our ability to learn, our decision-making and, most importantly, our social relations. If emotions are hierarchized, devaluated, mixed with stereotypes and prejudices, and attributed to specific groups of people – what does this do to the individual, and to us as a societies? Powerful as they are, political emotions can align or disalign individuals with communities, having the ability to foster solidarity or sow polarization, all depending on how we decide to engage them. This session will explore the transformative yet challenging potential of political emotions, reflecting about how emotions propel our political claims and how our politics shape the way we appraise our emotions.

Facilitator: Julia Sujin Noël, coach and consulting specializing in leadership and social learning. 

II. Politically Grounded Self Care: How self care can sustain our collective struggles

Date: Saturday, 20 July 2024

Our participation in collective action and movements can only be sustainable if we take steps to look after our needs and boundaries, both as individuals and the larger groups we belong to. If we aren’t looking after ourselves, we cannot hold space for others. Too often, this concept of self-care is represented as highly individualized or even consumerist, and as removed from a political grounding in our broader collective struggles. This workshop aims to explore tools and concepts that can help us care for ourselves in an explicitly political context, where self-care is understood in relation to our drive to sustain participation in collective struggles and movement organizing.

Facilitator: Hala Alyan, clinical psychologist, professor, and award-winning author.

III. Sustaining Societies of Care: Centering an Ethics of Care for Sustainable Social Transformation

Date: Saturday, 17 August 2024

Care is the essential relational practice that sustains the world we live in, it's everything we do to attend to the needs of what we want to maintain alive. Whether this is our communities, our movements, our societies or the entire ecosystem, none of them can do without care -and yet, the system we live in compels us to not value it as we should. But moving towards a more just and democratic society requires that we place care at the center of our societies, and in consequence, at the center of our politics. In this session, we will explore the importance of embracing an ethics of care to build towards a sustainable society, touching on the breadth and materiality of care, as well as on the ways by which care can open up our perspectives to challenge the current dominant system of interlocked injustices, to learn from the past, and to envision the future.

Facilitators: 

• Joan C. Tronto, professor emerita and author on care ethics.

• Deva Woodly, politics professor focusing on social movements and public discourse.

IV. Collective Care: Practicing Collective Care and Centering Interconnectedness in Our Struggles

Date: Wednesday, 25 September 2024

In this session, we will explore concrete examples of practices of collective care in movement contexts, and get a better understanding of the role these play in sustaining our organizing. The notion of collective care brings into focus the importance of interconnectedness in our struggles for social justice. It requires us to think outside the normal ways we’ve engaged with each other, including how we approach harm and safety; it allows us to dream and create a new world where love and solidarity are present. 

Collective care is both a strategy for growing and sustaining our organizing, as well as a form of praxis. By leveraging our time and material resources to ensure that care is centered, we model the practices and values at the heart of our struggle and bring into being a system of care where members are supported by the collective as they navigate individual and communal struggles. We will explore historical examples of collective care as well as current examples.

Facilitator: Adilka Pimentel, organizer and facilitator with deep expertise in youth and community empowerment.