By Travis Heath, Visiting Clinical Associate Professor, GSPP
As a pandemic continues to bear down in ways that would have been largely unimaginable to most in the United States one year ago and racist acts of violence leave minoritized communities on edge, many people are feeling overwhelmed and destabilized in ways that perhaps they haven’t before. This suffering has left institutions reeling and trying to devise ways to support their employees. Often the call is for people to engage in self-care. While this usually comes from a genuine place, this approach ignores the larger contexts in which people are trying to accomplish such care. Instead of asking people to engage in self-care, how might those of us in relative positions of power begin to reimagine the conditions people are working in such that caring for ourselves and our communities becomes a more viable possibility? What if we begin to consider care at the level of the community instead of placing that responsibility solely on the individual? How might we begin this work together?
Check out Travis’ Ted Talk to learn more about these ideas – Self Care to Communities of Care