the design justice network
care pod
A VIRTUAL CARE ECOSYSTEM
Beginning visions to transform the way design justice movements operate were seeded by me during my time as a Steering Committee Member (2020-2022) and co-organized with Corina Fadel and Michelle Lin-Luse.
After exploring what it might look like to practice more life-giving ways of design justice work and an embodied reflection of design justice principles through Care Circles for DJN members, I left the Steering Committee and took on the role of DJN Care Pod Lead fall of 2022. Expansions upon the care being built within the network was supported by a two-year grant and a new team of collaborators I invited to join the journey—Jody Chan (they/them) and the return of Corina Fadel (she/they).
With multi-passionate backgrounds in grassroots organizing, herbalism, bodywork, writing, holistic design strategy, emergent strategy, experience design, therapy, transformative justice and disability justice, our DJN Care Pod team stewarded the network’s commitment to care and healing justice.
The DJN Care Pod lived as a soft, regenerative space experimenting with how the lineages of care and healing justice might shape the way we design more just, community-led worlds.
MY ROLE
Visionary + Care Pod Lead
DURATION
Nov 2022 - Nov 2024
COLLABORATORS
Jody Chan and Corina Fadel
ORGANIZED WITHIN
Design Justice Network
Through virtual gatherings and online/offline togetherness, we cultivated practices, designed rituals, and built relationships of support and solidarity with those committed to liberation work outside of non-profit and institutional spaces.
This weaving of care through our design justice principles and collective processes has shaped the ways we hold space for our healing, both now and into the future.
Our gatherings were intentionally open to communities beyond DJN membership to nurture cross-movement, transnational connections. Applying design justice principles, we held listening and synthesis gatherings for future participants, co-facilitated with guest practitioners rooted in liberatory praxis. Themes throughout the two years included communicating through conflict, creating care teams, healing money wounds, and connecting with nature and our inner ecologies.
Genuinely curious about how we could foster deep, embodied connectedness in the digital realm, we were able to offer recordings, tech support, language interpretation in ASL and Spanish, emotional support, visual note-taking, breaks, and live transcription. Many of us in the Care Pod ecosystem—working as collaborators, care workers, and healing justice practitioners—are Mad, sick, and disabled ourselves, and committed to the work of cultivating collective access.
poetic reflection from one of the participants after practicing with our plantcestors during the series “Plancestral Roadmaps” facilitated by guest practitioner, Layla K. Feghali.
snapshot of a care lineage collage created by Precious Diamond B during the series, Astrology as a Portal to Prototyping Care Ecosystems facilitated by guest practitioner, Yoo-Jin Kang.
takeaway tool designed and offered by guest practitioners of BIPOC Death and Grief Talk as a companion piece to the series on “Grief, Money and Power”.
As part of the “Resourcing Our Care Lineages and Futures” Micro-Grants and Care Honorariums for DJN local nodes and working groups, we created ways of
re-granting funds to folks working at the intersections of care, design, and healing justice at both personal and collective levels.
Our micro-grants were efforts in honoring care practitioners who may not call themselves designers, but who are enacting the principles of design justice through their practice in the world.
We were able to resource 10 groups with $5000 micro-grants to support their ongoing work. With this project, we really wanted to build transnational connection and solidarity across borders; funded groups ranged geographically from Detroit to Toronto to Bogotá. We also resourced 5 local nodes/working groups with two rounds of $1000 care honorariums, inviting them to seed new possibilities of care within their own ecosystems.
One of the Care Honorarium recipients were members of the DJN Portland Node who held the experience, “aftercare: tending to ourselves, together” to engage in the balance between individual and community care rooted in Indigenous leadership.
what do we mean when we say care?
“Care May Be” is a document we generated for almost two years, starting from an idea to build a collective definition of care that I seeded and continued alongside collaborators, guest practitioners, and participants in every Care Pod gathering.
Instead of creating a single story or definition of care, we captured the longings and intuitions about what care may be for those of us practicing design justice. These shared expressions from participants at our first two gatherings were essential to informing and shaping the programming we could offer. We also integrated stories shared during our network-wide Annual Theme Weaving gathering that took place Spring 2023.
our care may be
hybrid gathering
The “Care May Be” Hybrid Gathering, held during the week of October 21, 2024, was a culmination of our two-year journey, an expression of what might come from following our intuitions and our listening to the broadened DJN community. The Hybrid Gathering nurtured critical connections between different branches of the Design Justice Network ecosystem. We offered resources for participants to facilitate a local (or virtual) care experience that activated the various echoes of what “care may be...” and to create artifacts that could be shared within an open resource library. To shape and inspire what each participant created, we returned to our “care may be” statements and also encouraged each group to write their own.
Below, is a video made by one of our hybrid gathering participants, Tender Possibilities, reading poetry and discussing the radical potential of dreams and collective dreaming as an intentional act of care.
archiving our
collaborative lineage
At the beginning of our two-year journey, we decided to establish a Care Pod Are.na page, for the way that Are.na allows us to share a non-linear and intuitive story of our work.
Multiple channels document our collaborative lineages and process; tools and offerings from guest practitioners; readings and resources that have informed our collective approach as the DJN Care Pod; digital care packages; and artifacts created by the participants of our “Care May Be” hybrid gathering.
Watching what has evolved and emerged has been so exciting for me and has created a lot of hope.
Being connected with this community has allowed me to be more explicit in claiming care as politically central to my work.
— Karishma Kripalani, guest practitioner for excavating our care lineages, dreaming our care possibilities