Put Care First

Caring for ourselves and one another is how we stay connected to our humanity, to the source of our power and dignity, and to the web of life. It is the purpose of community. It is the purpose of a solidarity economy.

We want a world in which everyone has what they need to thrive, to be joyful and to be well. Prioritizing quality of life for all human and non-human life means putting care first.

We need to feel safe. We need permission and space to be ourselves and pursue our passions. We need to feel like the rules of the community are fair and applied equitably. We need to have control of our culture—our language, food, dance, music, and history—and our land. And our communities, not just health professionals and politicians, need the power to define what trauma, care, wholeness, and health look like for themselves, because they look different everywhere.

Under capitalism, care—including our health, time, passions, and the environment itself—has been commodified. As we create different kinds of economies, we can measure value in different ways in our businesses and communities, and we can use these measurements to inform how and what we choose to build together. If our economy values care, then it will also include policies and protections such as family and medical leave, minimum wages, overtime, comprehensive benefits, and more. We need to structure our economy so that everyone can access quality healthcare, education, and housing.

Putting care first also means recognizing the labor of caretakers regardless of job title or wage. So much care work is invisible and undervalued in a capitalist economy. The work of caring for an elderly parent, giving birth and raising children, helping a friend in need, or repairing what we have so that we don’t need to buy more new things, is seen as something outside of the economy—something that people should do on top of the “real work” of earning a living. As we build solidarity economies, we know that care work is essential to the health of our communities, and we have to treat it that way.

A society that doesn’t honor and value care is not a society worth building. As the world changes around us, we must be willing to do what it takes to keep taking care of each other even as things get harder and new needs emerge. This is both the basis of the world we’re trying to create—and an essential part of how we get there.