A recent article on the rise of funding for health equity initiatives names the work of our Care Pod collaborators, Denise Shanté Brown, Corina Fadel, and Jody Chan as an example of initiatives designed to sustain the wellbeing of changemakers in social movement spaces. We invite you to recognize their impact with us by tracing the lineages of healing justice work informing our Network’s current care practices and Care Pod experiences.

Seasonal Pauses

First introduced at the end of 2020, Denise Shanté Brown and other members of DJN’s Steering Committee and contractor team, Wes Taylor, Sasha Costanza-Chock and Victoria Barnett, announced seasonal pauses more formally in 2021 as an expression of our Network’s principles aligning with practices of care.

Members on the Network’s Steering Committee and contractors who support different programming or operations of DJN may practice rest during seasonal pauses by slowing down, automating or stopping their responses to DJN-specific emails, engagement on or with DJN’s social media accounts, or work on specific projects, wherever possible.

Care Circles

The first Care Circle experiences in 2021 were also born from the same conversations seeding pauses as a practice, developed for DJN by Denise Shanté Brown, who then invited Corina Fadel and Michelle Lin-Luse to co-create and organize that space with her.

These virtual gatherings invited practitioners to share exercises, prompts and activities from their healing tradition: Carolyn Jones shared breathwork practices, Yves B Golden orchestrated a healing sound bath, Crystal Teng facilitated a body mapping session, and Lottie Spady guided participants through intuitive vision collages.

Collaborative Dreaming

Announced at the beginning of 2023, a two-year process of collaboratively dreaming and designing liberatory cultures of care began with the formation of our Care Pod Team, led by Denise Shanté, with Jody joining and Corina returning as co-collaborators.

Excavating Our Care Lineages, Dreaming Our Care Possibilities introduced the Care Pod’s guiding questions and beginning visions, identifying where dreams for care and healing justice live in our bodies, our hearts, and our lineages with the support of guest somatic practitioner, Karishma Kripalani.

Reflecting Back Our Longings & Intuitions expanded on the Care Pod team’s synthesis of the participants’ shared longings and wisdom that emerged from prompts in their first gathering by bringing forward those insights, looking ahead to themed offerings and experimenting with ways to connect to our intuition with the support of guest practitioner from Temperance Queer Tarot, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson.

A living document entitled Care May Be exists as a digital space to collect these and other reflections offered as Care Pod gatherings continue. Everyone who participates live or asynchronously is welcome to contribute responses that reflect how care may feel, show up or shift and transform their relationships, work and communities.

Care Pod Experiences

The long collective effort of Black organizers and care workers to position rest as an important act of resistance to racial capitalism is often coopted for trends in the wellness industry that reinforce care as an individualized commodity rather than a community act of collective solidarity.

Themes chosen for Care Pod public gatherings focus on care through the lens of communal interdependence and mutuality, inviting participants to first join a Care Circle to nurture a shared connection with the chosen theme, and then a Practice Space for exercising that understanding together:

communicating through conflict (care circle | practice space) September 2023’s Framing Conflict as Play sessions with somatic healing practitioner Meenadchi, whose work centers social change and embodied transformation, engage us in learning how to hold the multiplicity of our differences in generative, playful and authentic ways.

creating care ecosystems and care teams (care circle | practice space) November 2023’s Astrology as a Portal to Prototyping Care Ecosystems with healing justice practitioner Yoo-Jin Kang guides us through using astrology as a tool in prototyping care ecosystems, toward interdependence and togetherness.

healing money wounds (care circle | practice space) February 2024’s Grief, Money and Power sessions with BIPOC DEATH AND GRIEF TALK’s Kayla Carter and Carmen Galvan guide us through an exploration of grief, money, and power, in relation to design justice.

connecting with nature and our inner ecologies Still to come in July 2024, these sessions will explore themes of land, liberation, interdependence, mutual care, and practical wisdoms for building relationships with land and lineage that support us in our work to create more liberated worlds together.

Somatic Experiments

Programming for the Care Pod team’s two-year initiative includes access for the DJN team to monthly somatic sessions with practitioner and DJN member Em Wright.

Offered as a practice of sustaining changemakers in social movement spaces, these optional somatic sessions provide a supportive container for contractors and steering committee members to move toward embodying and fulfilling commitments in their roles while integrating somatic practices into their process.

Nodes & Working Group Support

In May of 2023, Care Pod collaborators made honorariums available to Design Justice Network's Local Nodes and Working Groups for use towards seeds of care they want to plant in and with their communities of practice.

Honorees shaped their collective experience of care through opportunities like a local tour focused on Black history and abolition, workshops for decolonizing and deconstructing storytelling in business, and a community cookout centering Indigenous practices of integrating plant medicine into meals.

The Care Pod also gathers points of reference and inspiration for design justice, care and healing justice on their Are.na channel Design Justice, Care & Healing Justice Reading Room as an ongoing resource for Node and Working Group members.

Cross-Movement Connections

As our Principles acknowledge: design mediates so much of our realities and has a tremendous impact on our lives. In rethinking design processes through our principles, centering people who are normally marginalized by design by using collaborative, creative practices calls for a commitment to care as a necessary part of that work.

Speaking as a panelist for our Network’s 2023 Theme-Weaving Kick-Off, Denise Shanté presented design as a process of care that manifests design justice as an embodied practice across multiple aspects of movement work and in a multitude of movement spaces:

Published in 2022 from Black Womxn Flourish, founded by Denise Shanté and nurtured alongside collaborators Precious Diamond Blake and N'Deye Diakhate, Dreaming Flourishing Futures: A Black Womxn's Manifesto for Designing the Worlds We Must Have To Be Well explores this interdependence of healing, care, design and justice.

This Manifesto was envisioned through a gathering of 40 Black womxn/women/femmes representing deep and wide Black diasporic identities who convened to dream of near and far futures in which we are all free. Further shaping and limited print distribution of Dreaming Flourishing Futures was made possible with the support of Emergent Strategy Praxis Project’s 6-month cohort and grant award (another initiative named in the What’s Next Health article.)

Care Pod collaborators curate these growing connections between design, care and healing justice lineages through their Are.na channels and on DJN’s webpage for Care Pod experiences. Updates on events and more opportunities to engage with Care Pod offerings will continue to be shared with our newsletter subscribers and on our events page.