Design Justice Network Care Pod
“a soft, regenerative space for dreaming and designing liberatory cultures of care” in black font, centered in an irregularly shaped yellow oval on a diffused pastel rainbow background.
Through virtual gatherings and online/offline togetherness, we experiment with how the lineages of care and healing justice might shape the way we design more just, community-led worlds.
Rather than being separate from the creative, collaborative work of design justice, we understand care as interdependent, liberating acts to be woven into our principles and processes. Just as Healing Justice and care has historically sustained the wellbeing of changemakers to protect the regeneration of communities and movements, we know we must cultivate practices that will holistically resource and fortify each other as design justice practitioners.
This shift towards care will shape the ways we hold space for our healing, build and deepen relationships, and design with those who have been strategically placed at the margins.
Join Our Care Pod Gatherings
The DJN Care Pod Team
On a pastel purple-yellow gradient background, the titles and names of DJN’s Care Pod Team frame profile pictures of each practitioner. On the left, Care Pod Collaborator Corina Fadel (she/they) looks directly at the camera, styled in a light tan shawl against a dark blue background. In the middle, Care Pod Lead Denise Shanté Brown (she/her) smiles broadly as she looks directly at the camera. To the right, Care Pod Collaborator Jody Chan (they/them) sits in front of a desk as they gaze up thoughtfully.
With multi-passionate backgrounds in grassroots organizing, herbalism, bodywork, writing, holistic design strategy, emergent strategy, experience design, therapy, transformative justice and disability justice — our DJN Care Pod team is stewarding the network’s commitment to care and healing justice.
As our team devotes energy, space, and time toward these activities, we too need to be nourished and supported. We’re engaging in monthly guidance sessions with somatic practitioner and DJN Member, Em Wright (they/them). These sessions provide a supportive container for us to move toward embodying and fulfilling our commitments while integrating somatic practices into our process. DJN Staff and Steering Committee Members are also participating in sessions to embody pathways toward a personal culture of care.
Our Care Pod Lineages
It was just over a year into the complex pandemonium along with rising demands for our bodies’ active participation in community organizing, mutual aid, justice events, expanded workplace roles, and beyond.
Our network noticed how we were continuing to hold much without many spaces to be held. Beginning visions to transform the way design justice movements operate was seeded by Denise Shanté Brown (previous Steering Committee Member and current Care Pod Lead) and co-organized with Corina Fadel (current Care Pod Collaborator) and Michelle Lin-Luse (DJN Member).
Collage made of various images, shapes, words, colours, and textures, set on a wooden surface. Created by Lindsay during our fourth Care Circle in 2022.
“Aliveness itself, if we choose the hard and sometimes scary work of coming home with awareness to our bodies, will nourish our visions of wholeness as well as our work to create the world we want.”
Deciding to explore what it might look like to nourish those visions of wholeness that we share alongside our communities, Care Circles were formed in 2021. These virtual gatherings became a place for us to:
Slow down and practice more life-giving ways of doing design justice work.
Approach design as a process of caring and an inquiry into care.
Witness a more sustainable, embodied reflection of the DJN principles.
Open to the experience of receiving nourishment through practices such as somatics, breathwork, creative play, intuition practices, meditation and other healing modalities.
Be in a continual place of rest, nurturance, play and possibility.
Orient ourselves toward the possibility of design justice being synonymous to care.
Share in a loving, communal responsibility for the health of our growing network.
The topics we explored and the practitioners
we collaborated with from 2021 - 2022
On a pastel purple-yellow gradient background, photos of previous collaborators in care with the Design Justice Network are arranged above their names and the practices they shared with the Network: 1) Breathwork Practice with Caroyln Jones, wellness advocate and founder of The Breathwork Lab; 2) Healing Sound Bath with Yves B Golden, multidisciplinary artist, writer, organizer, DJ; 2) Body Mapping with Crystal Teng, bodyworker, energy worker, and craniosacral therapy practitioner; 4) Intuitive Vision Collage with Lottie Spady, care collaborate at Healing by Choice! Detroit
Where We Are Now & What’s Emerging
Beginning with listening, we hosted two gatherings:
“Excavating Our Care Lineages, Dreaming Our Care Possibilities” to better understand how care can feel, what topics and practices people longed to experience, and how care can shift and transform our relationships, work and communities. Relational Somatic Coach Karishma Kripalani (she/her) joined to support us in identifying where our dreams for care and healing justice live in our bodies, our hearts, and our lineages.
“Reflecting Back Our Longings & Intuitions” to share our synthesis from the somatic dreaming we did together during our first Care Pod gathering, practice ways to listen more deeply, and look towards the next two years, giving more shape to the journey we will take together. Poet and Diviner, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson (he/him) joined to guide us through ways to deepen our intuition and the embodiment of care with tarot.
Caption text from the original social media post is center justified in black font; varied font sizes emphasize essential details. In Karishma's photograph on the first slide, she wears a gray top, gold hoop earrings and looks at the camera with a smile.
Cyree Jarelle, a black trans person, wearing a black hat, a leopard print shirt, and black pants. He is sitting in a chair by a tarot spread on a leopard print scarf. There are plants around and crystals. Photo by nat raum, 2022. Caption text from the original social media post is in a black font, center-justified on a bright yellow-to-blue gradient background accented by decorative elements in a diffused purple gradient.
A screenshot of the Care May Be document centered on a pastel rainbow gradient background.
“Care May Be”
A living document created to capture our longings and intuitions about what care may be for those of us practicing design justice. These shared expressions from participants at our first two gatherings were essential to informing and shaping the possibilities we could offer. We also integrated stories shared during our network-wide Annual Theme Weaving gathering that took place Spring 2023.
We invite people practicing design justice to add their responses as we continue to gather. You can access the document here.
Drawing on our synthesis process, and the challenges, possibilities, intuitions, and illuminations uncovered, we’re excited to share these four pod themes to guide our offerings over the next two years.
On a white background, four Care Pod Themes and associated months their events take place in are arranged in ovals in soft pastel gradients: 1) “communicating through conflict” is scheduled for September 2023; 2) “creating care ecosystems and care teams” in November 2023; 3) “healing money wounds” in February 2024; 4) “connecting with nature and our inner ecologies” in April 2024
Tuning into what feels alive among our Care Pod community, we will listen the possibilities of emergent offerings to support these pod themes that also touch on grief, creative ancestors, and imagination. With every gathering, we’ll continue to collaborate with a dynamic range of BIPOC practitioners who are guided by healing justice frameworks and committed to creating liberatory spaces with Access Intimacy. One of our Access Supports includes Emotional Support currently being held by bodymind peer supporter, miro sk (they/them), and educator and mind body coach, Dre Meller (they/them).
What are Care Circles?
Care Circles are invitations to begin cultivating the conditions that will allow us to create the worlds we want and need from a shared place of aliveness, nourishment, awareness, connectedness, rest, and communal care.
As gentle entries into the pod themes brought forward, Care Circles invite inquiry and introduce the possibility of design being a process of care. Each circle supports us in imagining new ways of being through embodied learning and offers practical tools as we explore how care and healing justice can transform our collaborations as design justice practitioners.
What are Practice Spaces?
Practice Spaces are where we go deeper into each pod theme, allowing us to shift the culture of design by processing what we've learned (and unlearned) in the Care Circles and applying it to our everyday lives and work.
With this space, we're building a pathway for design justice to live alongside care and creating opportunities for our learnings to ripple out to our specific communities and localities in relevant, adaptable ways. We will also gather here to create a second set of principles (a version of our Design Justice Principles that is care-centric) and name what will guide us closer to fully experiencing liberatory cultures of care.
Care Honorariums
What seeds of care do you want to plant in and with your community? Our Care Pod is now offering funding for DJN Local Nodes and Working Groups to use towards various forms of experiences that will nourish you and your design justice practice.
We hope that this financial offering of $500 can be used to support you all in practicing care together beyond our gatherings, in ways that feel collectively relevant for your group.
Caption text from the original social media post is center justified in black font on a floral element with a background in yellow-pink pastel gradient.
Stay Connected as We Journey Together
We invite you to journey through images, reports, books, talks, quotes, announcements and more on Are.na. You can explore our channels “Care Pod Collaborative Lineages”, “Design Justice, Care & Healing Justice Reading Room” and “Tools & Offerings from Our Gatherings, Care Circles & Practice Spaces”. Explore our Are.na here.
A screenshot of the Care Pod Team’s Are.na curations centered on a pastel rainbow gradient background.
For all questions, reflections and love notes - you can contact our Care Pod team at djncarepod@gmail.com