What does it mean to grow an organisation as an infrastructure of care?
As the MAIA team grows, we are considering what is required of us as individuals to cultivate a culture of care? What is required of the organisation’s infrastructure to embody care in employment, solidarity and colleagueship?
How do we situate care in the work towards liberation? Care is complex. Not least because, for many oppressed people globally, the very idea of accessing care is wrapped up in fear as a conditioned tendency following generations and centuries of being criminalised, incarcerated, abused, of losing human rights and being killed. The choice of care as one of MAIA’s four foundational values (alongside access, justice and joy), is far from incidental.
Care is not just about making people comfortable or responding compassionately to significant life events. Care is political. To paraphrase Mariame Kaba, care provides a necessary antidote to the violence and neglect built in to the current social structures, and seeks to acknowledge and address the impact of that upon successive generations trying to survive whilst swimming within the toxified waters of the current system.
Over the last 11 years, we have explored many different operational tools and technologies to embed care within the system of MAIA, beyond personality types and good intentions, into structural behaviours built practically upon those values. Examples we’ve attempted to codify within our internal organising include: wellbeing days and budgets for individual team members; therapist support for our events; changing contractual language; abundant team learning and recalibration time together; go-see funds to nurture interests and connections; Caregiver ‘role cards’ for projects and team; facilitated ‘Empty the Bucket’ sessions for team members to surface tensions and difficult feelings; Manuals of Me for sharing our needs and preferences, and ‘F*** Ups & High Fives’ Nights for celebrating successes and failures. All of these — and the many other strategies engaged — sit alongside the very function of our public programme, the heart of our learning and our relational and capacity-building infrastructure — in which we’re also creating shared and communal spaces for deeper study, culture-making and practice, rooted in care, access, justice and joy.
This work requires constant skilful and attentive adaptation as approaches become obsolete, undesirable, or urgent in changing landscapes, and the discourses around care change as context shifts. For example, 10 years ago, having care and access budgets within the workplace to cover a range of needs that centre how these differ across racialised and disabled people, was a radical intervention we explicitly fought for for years, while being delegitimised and labeled ‘naive’ for the assertion. We joined many other movement leaders, cultural workers and campaigning groups to make the case for structural address that resulted in care and access budgets (along with higher pay) becoming a culturally-accepted norm across sectors. By the time resource at scale is unlocked to adequately meet just immediate material needs alone, in recognition of structural (not just individualised) violence, the specificity of the needs of the people and earth have shifted substantially. Strategies and responses would become redundant quickly if we didn’t nurture our capacity to adapt as a core tenet of emergence.
“We cannot work unless we are dedicated to our ongoing learning. The reciprocal nature of education demands that in order to move towards collective liberation, we must remain students.”
— Sage M. Stephanou
Yet, we have observed how the proliferation of tools, processes and roles can begin to obscure something more foundational. Under the gravitational pulls of capitalism, consumption logics, a preoccupation with ‘self’hood and the conditioned tendencies shaped by sustained and structural violence, it is easy to drift into care and caring as transactional endeavours, as something that you are either the provider or the recipient of, rather than reciprocal and abundant flows of exchange.
We could see how the emphasis on ‘providing care’ for the individuals that make up our team was one-directional in practice, affecting our ability to care for our mission, practice, wider relations and the work that we were trying to do together. In this paradigm, our collective approach to care work was also enacted within a human-centric ideology, in turn affecting our ability to widen the scope of our caring beyond immediate human-to-human relationships to the more expansive entangled network of more-than-human, animate / inanimate stewardship relationships that we know that we are in kinship with.
“Too often self-care in our organizational cultures gets translated to our individual responsibility to leave work early, go home — alone — and go take a bath, go to the gym, eat some food and go to sleep. So we do all of that ‘self-care’ to return to organizational cultures where we reproduce the systems we are trying to break.”
— Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha - Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice
Centring care within an organisational context is an endless balancing act. How can we retain the emphasis on the political and structural nature of this work when the demands of the world around us pull us towards the transactional and the superficial? If we only think about care in a fiscal sense, as in “what can we pay for?”, or transactionally, as in “what do I get for this?”, we are simply furthering the neocapitalist logic that has created a wellness industry, responding to an ideology of ‘care’ that escalates the very systems that produce social and ecological breakdown.
In many ways, the compounding effects of the ‘polycrisis’ also facilitate intra-personal and community relationship breakdowns, leading to a loss of resource beyond the financial. How do we really show up to the task of reciprocal care when forced into postures of isolation, scarcity and individualism? How can we tend to one another’s needs and wounds so that we can sustain ourselves within the work? If we are to grapple with the real scale and depth of needs within our community, how can we sustain as an organisation in that context without being swallowed by the challenge? If taking care of individualised needs is the sole focus and not in service of collective liberation, we will not make any progress towards the structural shifts that we want to see, which, after all, is the reason for us coming together in the first place.
Furthering this, individual organisations cannot be tasked with fixing the entirety of systemic failure. Nor can they be blamed as though such a capacity is possible. This does not negate accountability or imply our efforts are wasted in care work. The point is that at any given moment where collective liberation is a North Star, we use what we have to do what we can, hoping that the care practices and relationships we engage in afford the grace, dignity and patience needed. That can only ever be one small piece of the stack of interventions and approaches required for the infrastructuring of care. This is why robust, diligent partnership and practical solidarities become essential for this work, as sites we contribute our collective capacity and capabilities to the work of transformation.
It was in this spirit that our team began our year in dialogue with some beloved peers and collaborators to explore the provocation: what does it mean to grow an organisation as an infrastructure of care?
Care Work Constellations
Being in intentional co-learning relationships with others has always been key to our practice. Bringing a range of perspectives, practices and ideas into the conversation felt essential to move us into greater depth within our care work. So for this phase of deepening into our care practice, we brought together a number of peers whose work has inspired us to explore the question with our team:
- Emily Bazalgette’s work has long been an inspiration to us at MAIA, but her recent explorations and insights around chronic-illness informed organising (as shared during a brilliant School of System Change: Constellating Change session at the end of last year) made her an ideal collaborator and facilitator for this dialogue.
- Healing Justice London have walked alongside us for many years and their embodied, abolitionist approach, engaging politicised somatics as a tool for capacity-building and transformation, has made a deep impression upon our analysis of care.
- Our neighbours CoLab Dudley have an organising philosophy inspired by permaculture, biomimicry and seasonality, which they write about beautifully in their blog
- Our therapist collaborator, Karen Dhalmini, who has been working with our community and with our team over the past year.
In addition to the voices in the conversation, we have also been inspired by the work of other peers in our ecosystem that put considerable energy and care into this work, particularly Dark Matter Labs, whose wise and generous Beyond the Rules work gives us a solid foundation to build upon. We also move in the lineage of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, The Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective and Civic Square, who each shared the idea of ‘pods’ as an organising method (see below), which is proving to be a critical part of our infrastructure. This period connects with the frameworks and practices of those who have shaped our analysis and politics of care long-term, including but not limited to Cara Page and Erica Woodland, Mia Mingus, Staci K. Haines, Susan Raffo, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and The Black Panther Party.
What do we mean by care?
Care is a word that serves many purposes: from simple physical acts, to internal emotional responses, to services provided, to more holistic principles and philosophies — the concept of care can shift depending on context, positionality, value system and many other factors. Developing a shared understanding of what we mean when we talk about care was essential in our conversations.
When we started to unpack this, we found that we had multiple overlapping responses that we all identified with.
- Care involves belonging and connection — being supported to notice / be aware of ourselves and the roles we play.
- Care should be reciprocal and multi-directional. It shouldn’t be standardised or transactional, and certainly shouldn’t be seen as something that ‘trickles down’ within a liberation-oriented organisation, but something we make for one another.
- Care allows us to show up with our mistakes and feel held.
- Care is a regenerative practice and it requires us to act.
- Care isn’t easy.
Tianna, MAIA’s Communications Lead, offered a moving description of care that we all gravitated to:
“Some people talk about poverty as being a thousand petty humiliations each day — what if we saw care as offering a thousand tiny dignities every day?”
— Tianna Johnson
Emerging from our conversation about care came a related conversation about accountability. It can often feel uncomfortable speaking about care and accountability together as though they are somehow in opposition — where ‘care’ might need to do a lot of heavy lifting in our language, ‘accountability’ undeniably comes with a great deal of heavy baggage. But when we consider whom or what we care for, this connection becomes clearer. It is essential that our conception of care is not limited by thinking only about human-human relationships, it can, and should, be so much wider than this. Emily shared the following definition that she is drawn to:
“Care is a deep concern and tending of the self, us, the others and the bigger field. It can strengthen relationships, promote systemic sustainability, and lobby for just practices and policies.”
— Lana Jelenjev
If we see accountability as one of the ways in which we exist in our dignity and show care for our team, for our shared purpose, for our ancestors and for future generations, what does this make possible? Exploring this further, we surfaced that:
- Accountability is a pull from within, it should not be punitive or imposed from the outside
- Accountability is a discipline, not a fixed destination; it is found and crafted in the process
- Accountability to our mission (and its wider context) is what enables autonomy and agency
- Accountability is boundaried vulnerability and honesty, where we understand our entanglements and can walk beside one another (at different paces if needs be)
“We talked a lot about how care requires an in-the-moment sensing of need — I think accountability requires something similar, the in-the-moment sensing of boundaries.”
— Emily Bazalgette
Themes, ideas and synthesis
There were a number of core interconnected ideas that we returned to in our conversations across the day that felt fundamental to our emerging approach:
- Discernment: how do we get better at noticing our internal in-the-moment reactions and expand the moment that allows us to pause and choose how we respond in a way that serves us? Many of us have developed or inherited survival strategies that have kept us safe in other contexts but may no longer be necessary, appropriate to the context, or may even be harmful to ourselves or others around us. How can we learn to differentiate and sense between feeling uncomfortable and feeling unsafe and gift ourselves the time and spaciousness to choose an appropriate response?
- Resilience: how can we build our muscle for doing hard things, having hard conversations and sitting with discomfort? This is resilience as anti-fragility (as Nkem Ndefo describes it), and sits in opposition to the harmful ways in which the notion of ‘resilience’ is often weaponised against marginalised people, to absolve systems, structures and history of any complicity in harm and suffering. Resilience is not about expanding our capacity to endure the status quo! Embodied resilience is a kind of flexible strength to meet challenges, inviting a re-connection of the mind-body as a guide and companion, in order to shift systems.
- Consent: how can we widen our field of vision when it comes to practicing consent with one another? How do we practice consent with ourselves to be able to effectively show up in the work? Where are the opportunities to practice that conventional ways of working may encourage us to overlook?
- Boundaries: how do we get better at noticing, setting and holding our own personal boundaries in order to create practices and relationships that we can sustain for the longer term?
“Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.”
— Prentis Hemphill
We also reflected how the work that is required of us here is personal work done in community. That is, it requires us to commit to individual ‘inner work’ upon ourselves that can only be practiced and realised in community with other people. This principle has been a golden thread running through MAIA’s programme across our ten years, where the line between ‘external activity’ and ‘organisational development’ is often intentionally and generatively blurred, offering opportunities to build the sustenance, resilience and capacity of our internal and individual practices together.
This was further reaffirmed and strengthened by the reading we had been doing as a team over the winter break, as we started reading Healing Justice Lineages by Cara Page and Erica Woodland together. The book is an incredible drawing together of the learning from 20 years of organising in the US, and of the history of struggle that preceded that period. They talk about healing justice as a mechanism that seeks to transform the trauma, pain and grief that inevitably emerges during movement work, transforming it into community rooted practices that build care, respect, dignity and protection in our work towards liberation. In Tamika Middleton & Cara Page’s chapter ‘Conjuring the Roots of Healing Justice in the South East’, they outline three principles of healing justice:
Principle #1: Collective trauma is transformed collectively
Principle #2: There is no single model of care
Principle #3: Healing strategies are rooted in place and ancestral technologies
— Tamika Middleton & Cara Page - Healing Justice Lineages
Just as we cannot heal from collective or intergenerational trauma alone, we cannot grow our internal capaciousness for having hard conversations, or develop the ability to discern the roots of our own reactions and the appropriateness of our responses, without a community of others who are willing to support us as we practice and hold us when we misstep. In this way, care is a collective endeavour — it needs all of us to participate.
Another theme that came through in our conversations was how our practices at the small scale might inform our practices at the organisational scale and beyond. How might care be fractal?
‘When we speak of systemic change, we need to be fractal. Fractals — a way to speak of the patterns we see — move from the micro to the macro level. The same spirals on sea shells can be found in the shape of galaxies. We must create patterns that cycle upwards.’
— adrienne maree brown - Emergent Strategy
When our most recent team members joined us at the end of 2023, we adopted the idea of ‘pods’ — small groupings of 3–4 team members who would act as buddies and peer support to one another — following study of The Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective’s pod mapping and a conversation on the practicalities of embracing this approach within an organisational setting with our friends at Civic Square. What becomes possible if we see our pods as micro-infrastructures of care? How can our learning at this scale inform our learning at the organisation scale?
Over the last 8 years, MAIA has been seeding the concept of ABUELOS, a relational infrastructure of care at scale, demonstrating radical hospitality at every layer. As we grow out the hidden wiring and infrastructure that enables this capability, learnings at this stage are informing how we codify and embody care within the large scale project that reimagines a hotel as a cultural, civic infrastructure as part of a long-term strategy for building possibility for radical culture-making, community imagination and wealths.
Finally, as mentioned above, any conversation that seeks to connect and integrate the concepts of care and accountability inevitably causes some discomfort. After the session, Emily reflected:
‘..the team are more clear and more comfortable in the space of care than accountability. It’s also clear that there’s some deep wounds around accountability (fear of judgement, experiences of weaponised accountability, etc). Which is pretty normal — our first experiences of accountability are our families and our schooling, and we don’t often get good role modelling in those environments! I’m left wondering: how might you heal your relationship with accountability?’
Emily Bazalgette
This provocation is powerful, inviting us to find liberatory capacity, joy and intimacy when practicing accountability with one another. This feels like a rich seam of enquiry that we would love to explore further.
Our commitments to practice
Alongside these discussions of concepts and principles, we also made some commitments to working practices that we want to rehearse together over the coming months. We are sharing these to invite dialogue and also as part of our organisational accountability practice — we will share our reflections and learnings later in the year.
- Training in politicised somatics, embodiment practice and embodied resilience: these are practices that help us to recognise and transform our trauma responses, to hone our discernment, to build our resilience and, overall, to be more comfortable moving through the world as our integrated, embodied selves. Amahra deepened her politicised somatics training by studying with Staci K. Haines at an abolitionist somatics retreat for movement leaders, generously hosted by Healing Justice London in summer 2023. We would like to extend this learning to our team and eventually to our wider community as our skills grow. More information about Staci K. Haines here: https://www.stacihaines.com/ and another avenue for learning here is Nkem Ndefo’s Resilience Toolkit: https://theresiliencetoolkit.co/about/
- Pods as micro-infrastructures of care: we established our pods in November 2023 and, so far, they are going strong. We initially built in ‘pod time’ at the start of each team meeting but our pods are now self-directed and groups are agreeing between themselves how they would like to support one another. We agreed to create an opportunity for review, reflection and sharing learning between the pods in spring or early summer.
- Building our skill and capacity for hard conversations: alongside resilience training, we talked about a number of possible ways we could go about this — might we get into the habit of holding regular ‘maintenance meetings’ focused on surfacing and resolving interpersonal or operational issues? We started to practice something along these lines last year with our ‘empty the bucket’ conversations facilitated by our therapist, Karen, to enable everyone to share feelings and feedback. We’re keen to explore other avenues of practice too, such as role playing or contact improvisation, to help us to build this muscle and are developing a resource of different approaches and methodologies we could consider. We might also need other ways to bolster our confidence in approaching hard conversations, such as developing a ‘First Aid Kit’ of tools that we can use when we make mistakes or when things don’t go as well as we hope.
- People risk assessments: team member Jodie described how, in a previous role, projects would include a ‘people risk assessment’ alongside the usual health and safety risk assessment, considering care and access needs for participants and team members to ensure that all stay well during the course of the work. Jodie is going to provide some team training so that we can create our own version of this.
- Adopting and embedding chronic-illness-informed ways of working: inspired by Emily’s Constellating Change talk, in our (Re)Orientation week, we agreed that we wanted to work towards developing a ‘continuous handover’ style of working i.e. what would we need to do / document / put in place to ensure that someone else could pick up our work tomorrow if we are unwell? We’ve made steps towards this, making as much use of Notion for documenting and planning work as possible and setting up a team ‘kanban’ board for tracking our bigger tasks and making progress visible to others. We really acknowledged it takes time to design effective processes and recalibrate to new operational flows, particularly when capacities are already stretched.
- Wellbeing check-ins and care plans: in previous times, our systems for individual check ins blurred the lines between supporting wellness and supervising work — team members would have a single 1–1 conversation that tried to cover all bases. This made it difficult to make the right sort of space for either conversation, and often reinforced a parent-child dynamic between those holding responsibility for organisation-wide co-ordination and those with a focus on specific activities. From March this year, we have commissioned Karen Dhlamini to provide quarterly wellbeing coaching sessions with all team members (including the co-ordination team), focused on supporting people to develop their own individual care plans. These care plans will consider the factors that might affect our wellbeing and the strategies and support we need to have in place for when things are not going well (inside or outside of work). Critically, the care plans will be confidential between the individual and Karen, allowing deeper considerations and reflection, with the individual deciding how and what to share with others.
If collective access is revolutionary love without charity, how do we learn to love each other? How do we learn to do this love work of collective care that lifts us instead of abandons us, that grapples with all the deep ways in which care is complicated?”
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha - Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice
Hesitations, concerns and further questions
So we have plenty to get into over the coming months, and in the weeks since our conversations in January, and particularly whilst writing this piece, other questions have arisen that we might want to reflect upon as we move through the next few months. These might shape how we manifest the initial commitments we have made, or maybe sow some seeds for the next phase of the work:
- How can we design for circularity in our care and accountability practices and make them regenerative, across flows of power and presence? Put another way, how do we hold ourselves accountable to our accountability processes and ensure that the ‘outputs’ always feed the next stage of learning?
- How do we continue to embed these learning journeys within our community programme and relationships, as well as preserving team-only time, without creating premature notions of ‘expertise’?
- The commitments to practice we have made this time around have been concerned with the human-human relationships that form the core of our organisation. What could it look like if we widened the scope of our care practices to radically centre more-than-human relationships, in which we move beyond the subjectivities of “human” supremacy?
- We’re a neurodiverse team with varying experiences of disability and chronic illness, considering how to pay deeper attention to the specificities afforded by Disability Justice in the practice of care. We do this while also recognising many embodiment framings still have a way to go regarding Disability Justice praxis and for those for whom reconnecting with their bodies is painful. To further reiterate — there can be no singular approach to care work when we centre a Disability Justice analysis, the tools to practice and strengthen personal discernment may be very different for someone who finds interoception (the ability to notice and interpret internal sensory signals) challenging, or those who experience alexithymia (difficulty identifying and expressing emotions), as many neurodivergent people do. How can we be present with how ideas of discernment are framed, embodied and practiced — providing multiple routes into participation while staying attuned to the spectrum of ways people process information?
We’d love to hear from anyone on similar journeys who has learning to share or questions to ask. And we look forward to sharing the results of our rehearsals, our work-in-progress, later on in the year.
