Dear DJN Members, Signatories, and Friends,

Dec 20, 2021 - Jan 2, 2022, our Steering Committee team and staff will begin our fourth DJN network seasonal pause. Our final Pause for 2021 is an extended one! As 2021 draws to a close, we are entering a mood of rest, reflection, and celebration. So much has happened this year, and we know that we have much more to do to build a world where many worlds can fit. One thing we know is that we are so thankful to be in community with all of you in the Design Justice Network!

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 caring 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 December 20, we again encourage individual and organizational members and DJN Local Nodes and Working Groups to figure out their own approach to taking pauses and share that back with the Network in our Slack channel, #intentionalpauses.

With an orientation toward creating more rest within design justice,

Denise Shanté, Sasha, Wes, Boaz, Nou, Elena, and Marta, and DJN Staff Taylor and Victoria

Upcoming Design Justice Network Pauses:

We will announce in the new year (2022) - our pause dates for 2022!