Dear DJN Members, Signatories, and Friends,

Starting April 26 through May 2nd, our Steering Committee team and staff will begin our first week-long seasonal pause.

We started 2021 by mapping possibilities for the year ahead and ways we could best harness our collective energies to support organizing, events, resource and tool creations, and allow time for introspection and dreaming. One of the ways we’re beginning to harness our collective energies for the work of design justice is by making intentional space for rest and wellness.

We believe in care for the health of our network and for ourselves. We see intentional pauses as an important practice for sustained movements and see paid breaks as an act of generously honoring each other’s bodies beyond what or how much we produce. To show appreciation for our work in the world, one of the best things we can do is to give each other time and space to heal. By taking this pause, we want to model what it looks like to take the time we need to be well and recenter ourselves within movement spaces.

Taking an intentional pause is a living expression of aligning design justice work with practices of care. We’re learning how to model what it means to approach the work of design justice differently, in hopes that other movements can integrate time to pause as well. We recognize that taking pauses and care require resources, and that can feel like an impossible luxury; but we are doing our best in an unequal world to make it happen. We are thinking about how to seed and support everyone in DJN (and beyond) to do this through the new formation of Care Circles and more.

Moving into the week of April 26, we encourage individual and organizational members and DJN Local Nodes to figure out their own approach to taking pauses, and share that back with the Network after May 2 in our new channel, #intentionalpauses.

With an orientation toward creating more rest within design justice,

Denise Shanté, Victoria, Sasha, and Wes

Upcoming Design Justice Network Pauses:

Summer: June 28 - July 4
Fall: Sept 27 - Oct 3 and
Winter: Dec 20 - Jan 2 (extended end-of-year break)