What is collective care?
Care is beautiful. Care is needed. Care is essential and has to come up front in any line of work.
In our project Self-Care and Collective Care for Community Resilience we dived into an exploration of care and the meaning behind it for our communities in the field of adult education. First, we have conducted a research where we attempted to identify what self-care and collective care mean and how it is understood in a non-capitalist setting. Our team acquired its inspiration from feminist scholars such as Bell Hooks and Audre Lorde who claimed the need for rest as resilience, care as must, and collective solidarity as the path for resilience.
In our horizontal Collective Care Research Group, we conducted an analysis that attempts to bring to light the concepts of self-care and collective care and serves as alternatives to neoliberal and capitalist productivity working methods. We have met, analyzed, talked and discussed until we agreed on a definition and diversity of concepts behind care.
In the second stage of our project, we met in Kamena Vourla, Greece with our Greek partner Genderhood. We provided an opportunity for people to present their workshops on care and explore various methods of practising care. Childcare was one of them, as our project supported three children joining the laboratory with additional caretakers.
The presented picture depicts one of the workshops, which is the carpet we felted together as a group.
In the third stage of our project, which is still a work in progress, we will collect research and laboratory, and all the collective care work outcomes and publish them in a beautiful Zine that will be shared as an open access with everyone who is interested in the topic of resilience in their communities.
Stay tuned!
FemLink and Genderhood teams
