Community care is at the heart of a healthy social movement. Community care protects against stress, trauma, conflict and burnout, and nourishes people to remain involved. It also attracts new people because they find a supportive culture of the type we want to live in. Community care means investing in personal and group culture change, allowing us to build deeper, more supportive relationships, including emotional and practical care for each other. When we actively care for our community, we start to shift dominant norms, and build our personal and our collective capacity for action and change.
An important part of community care is a practice of ‘mutual aid’. During crises, we often see people support each other according to their capacity and needs, (rather than private wealth and financial transactions). To build a mass movement to confront the climate crisis, we must encourage a culture of mutual aid, and extend the generosity that people show in times of acute disaster into the whole fabric of our lives.