Le texte ne s’affiche pas intégralement dans la langue que vous avez sélectionnée ? La Boîte à outils ne cesse d’évoluer, et il semblerait que nous n’ayons pas encore totalement traduit cet article. Contactez-nous si vous avez envie de traduire de nouveaux textes!

En bref

Activities and practices for building individual, small-group, and community resilience, so we can create sustainable, impactful, and thriving groups capable of changing the world for the better.

”That’s all anybody can do right now. Live. Hold out. Survive. I don’t know whether good times are coming back again. But I know that won’t matter if we don’t survive these times.

— Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

Origines

This tool is an entry point to a Beautiful Trouble resource for trainers titled “Building resilience: Self-care and community care for the long haul.”

To create sustainable, impactful, and thriving groups capable of changing the world for the better, we must prioritize practices that build our resilience as individuals, small groups, and large communities—what follows are several activities or practices that seek to do just that.

While occasional stress is a normal part of life, unmanaged, chronic stress can damage our health, our relationships, our networks, and our effectiveness as changemakers. Our experiences of trauma and oppression, including those acquired in direct confrontation with systems of violence, exploitation, and domination, can exacerbate this stress response. And we know too well that, as the saying goes, “hurt people hurt people” — the cycle of violence and abuse, unless it is interrupted, ripples out, person to person and generation to generation.

By failing to take care of ourselves, we harm our health, hinder our efforts, and hurt the people, causes, and communities we are trying to protect.

These challenges plague all communities, including activist communities. Yet abuse and interpersonal violence among activists too often go unaddressed in order to focus on an external threat or urgent goal. The damage that unmitigated exhaustion, stress, and abuse do to our movements is incalculable, and too often unacknowledged. By failing to take care of ourselves, we harm our health, hinder our efforts, and hurt the people, causes, and communities we are trying to protect.

Addressing these challenges requires us to consider three circles of care: self-care, collective care, and community resilience. We must understand that healthy individuals and healthy communities are intimately intertwined, and therefore, building resilience requires us to act at several levels at once.

What follows is an accessible set of resources tailored to activists, facilitators, and organizers. These resources are offered as potential starting points, rather than as a comprehensive program. They are also not intended to prioritize individual self-care to the exclusion of or at the expense of collective care work. At the end of the day, resilience can never be just an individual pursuit—we stand together, or not at all.

It’s also crucial to recognize that historically, and to this day, the burden of care in families, communities, and activist groups has disproportionately been gendered female, and racialized. An intersectional, feminist lens is integral to understanding that “care” is a collective responsibility.

Finally, because people power is often seen as “putting your body on the line,” it is good praxis to acknowledge that the body keeps the score, and to learn how to ask for and receive the help we need to counterbalance this score. It can be irresponsible, counter-productive, and even life-threatening to do otherwise.

Comment utiliser

Here are facilitator notes for five exercises that groups can use to build resilience:

Embodied practice: Self-care and regulation: Embodied practice harnesses body awareness through breathing and movement to support individuals and groups in responding to stress and triggering events in real-time.
Embodied practice: Community care and co-regulation: Promoting situational and bodily awareness, embodied practice employs breathing, movement, arts, and culture to support individuals and communities in regulating stress and responding adaptively to triggering events.
Mental/emotional health first aid: A brief overview for activists, organizers, and/or facilitators on how to approach and handle mental and emotional health challenges in a group or at an action.
Building resilient groups: An exercise for supporting and motivating groups to build strong structures and healthy processes to improve group resilience for the long haul.
Self- and community care in action: While care should be woven into the fabric of our work, we need to be particularly cognizant of incorporating self and community care when it’s action time.