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Summary

Collective care is the discipline of building the care infrastructure — emotional, physical, organisational, political — that a group needs in order to sustain its members through the predictable cycles of activism, including the high-risk periods; it is the psychosocial dimension of protection-planning and a precondition for any long-term organising project.

Body

Collective care names the practice of designing and running the routines — opening go-rounds, closing check-ins, peer-support pairings, healing circles after a loss, time-off protocols, care coordinators in the affinity group, the political reading of burnout as a structural rather than personal problem — that keep a group functional across the years rather than months of an organising project. The IM-Defensoras Autocuidado / Travesías para pensar y actuar corpus operationalises a feminist collective-care frame for women defenders in Mesoamerica: care is located inside the political struggle rather than as an apolitical retreat from it, and the practice is built around two workshop scripts the network has developed — a taller básico de autocuidado (basic self-care workshop) that walks a group through a structured sequence of body-based and reflective activities to surface the participants’ current state and design individual and collective care practices, and a taller de sanación de pérdidas (healing-losses workshop) that is a structured group process for defenders who have experienced the death, disappearance, or political imprisonment of a colleague [source: im-defensoras-autocuidado]. The Comité Cerezo’s Manual de seguridad para organizaciones sociales extends the care discipline into the organisational-security frame, arguing that a protection plan that does not include the care infrastructure for the defenders who carry it will not survive the first crisis; seguridad integral requires cuidado colectivo as one of its pillars alongside digital, physical, and legal security [source: comite-cerezo-seguridad-organizaciones]. Tactical Tech and Front Line Defenders’ Holistic Security Manual adds the explicit framing that psychosocial wellbeing is the third leg of the holistic-security tripod (alongside digital security and organisational security), and that a campaign can lose more capacity to burnout, secondary trauma, and political disillusionment than to surveillance or arrest if the care infrastructure is missing [source: holistic-security-tactical-tech]. The cross-cutting claim that the collective-care corpus makes is that burnout is structural rather than personal: a defender who burns out is not the failure of an individual resilience practice but the failure of an organisation that did not build the time, the role distribution, the political analysis of why the work matters, and the peer-support infrastructure that would have sustained them. The collective-care discipline is therefore inseparable from activist-wellbeing (the broader practice of designing for sustainable activism), from protection-planning (the operational-security discipline that integrates the care infrastructure), and from popular-education (the political-education tradition that builds the shared analysis of why the work is worth the cost).

Use it for

Designing a self-care workshop for women defenders in Spanish; integrating care infrastructure into an organisational security plan; running a healing-losses workshop after the death, disappearance, or political imprisonment of a colleague; reading burnout as a structural problem rather than an individual failure; building peer-support and time-off routines into an organising project.

Worked examples

  • protection-planning — the operational-security discipline that care infrastructure must integrate.
  • activist-wellbeing — the broader practice of which collective care is the organisational dimension.
  • holistic-security-tactical-tech — the corpus that locates collective care alongside digital and organisational security.
  • movement-coaching — the long-term coaching relationship that builds the cohort-care discipline the care practices depend on.

Open Questions

How to keep the care discipline alive in organisations whose membership turns over quickly (youth-led climate groups, single-campaign coalitions) — the peer-support routines need to be onboardable in weeks, not months.

Sources & verification

Verified 2026-07-01 by llm-qc.

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