Community care & relationship building combats burnout in political movements
Community care & relationship building combats burnout in political movements
8 lessons on how we can organize sustainably
Why do movements and organizing spaces in the west often suffer from a pattern of “Boom & Bust activism”? From the 2020 uprisings in the aftermath of the highly publicized police murder of George Floyd to the recent intensification of the genocide in Palestine with the assault on Gaza, there’s some consistent patterns.
By “Boom & Bust activism” I’m referring to a common cycle that begins with some long-standing injustice garnering some new attention of the western public —> followed by mass mobilizations, protests, widespread momentum, people awakening & radicalizing, many motivated to take action against colonial empires/ states/ capitalism, new organizing collectives formed to channel this energy —> then as time goes on, less & less people remain as fervently & resiliently invested in the cause —> and eventually… often, there is widespread burnout and collapse of many movement groups. Rinse and repeat.
Some people who are “new” to the cause may lose steam because they don’t seek community to ground into to sustain their commitment, others may normalize oppression to return to the status quo when the novelty of a “trending” cause has passed. I’ve written about how community helps us get un-stuck when we’re tempted to “look away” or incapacitated with grief:
But today I’m interested in unpacking burnout within political spaces and how we can build sustainable community organizing collectives. I’ll focus more on new groups that are born in the middle of these “pressure cooker” moments in response to visible intensification of oppression whether it is a pandemic, a brutal police murder of a Black man caught on camera or a livestreamed genocide.
This piece is for you if you are an organizer. This piece is also for you if you are a human seeking to co-create and ground into a life-sustaining community that is resilient and long-lasting.
P.S. This piece is a bit longer than usual but it was worth the extra push. I wanted to take time to do it justice. It is written so it can be read in spurts if you’d like!
+ If you missed the last heal in community session on turning grief into action, the link to the recording is at the end of the newsletter!
From October 2023 onwards— there have been many novel or revamped organizing collectives & groups that have emerged inspired by the Palestinian liberation struggle. These groups are a result of passionate, well-intentioned people from a variety of backgrounds, with diverse levels of community organizing experience, coming together. This is a common occurrence across different social justice causes. What is heartbreaking is the fact that many of these groups (that emerge reactively in the middle of such intensity) struggle to sustainably exist past the 6 month, 1 year or 2 year mark.
I’ve seen it around me. I’ve been in the thick of it. I’m currently helping many organizers in the west navigate these crises of sustainability right now. I’ve seen times where a group’s collapse was inevitable and exactly what was needed to give birth to something better anew. But I’ve also seen what works, thanks to many incredible co-organizers and dear friends I’ve built with over the years. Over the last decade in the Palestine solidarity movement, I’ve intimately seen many groups struggle, build resilience, grow, mature, navigate hardships and ultimately last for a long time. I want to share some life-changing lessons I’ve learned from these resilient spaces on the root causes, symptoms and potential solutions to collective burnout.
The root cause of burnout: lack of collectivist community infrastructure and reciprocal relationships
People, with any level of organizing experience, are highly susceptible to burning out in the west— especially during periods of mass mobilization or when they are dealing with personal crises without community support. Burnout doesn’t simply look like an individual explicitly identifying that they are leaving a space because they are exhausted. Dean Spade defines burnout in mutual aid groups as ‘the combination of resentment, exhaustion, shame, and frustration that make us lose connection to pleasure and passion in the work and instead counter difficult feelings like avoidance, compulsion, control, and anxiety’.
Surveys on political movement patterns show that many activists who burnout (during periods of heightened public awareness when faced with the pressure to facilitate rapid mobilization) end up leaving an organizing space or a movement altogether rather than temporarily stepping back or taking a hiatus. An individual burning out takes a toll on the collective, and can hamper the sustainability of a movement space. Inversely, a collective that fails to prioritize sustainability causes individual burnout. There are a million stressors all churning together in a pressure cooker that eventually pops off. Ultimately, burnout and exhaustion (in life in general) is a collective crisis that is a result of the lack of collectivist communal structures that support people’s day-to-day survival.
Alienation and isolation are the status quo for people living in a hyper-capitalist, colonial society in the heart of empires. This structural context doesn’t change for people who are trying to push for the abolition of oppressive systems. We’re inside the matrix that we are trying to dismantle. We do not have to be wholly consumed & defined by it. However, we are susceptible to being shaped by the values of the empire just as anybody else. Knowing this allows us to be aware of our own bulls**t. It takes intentional labor to flip the script and build liberating community. I’ve written before about how people in political movements in the west often de-prioritize caregiving, intimacy and relationships which drives collective burnout and widespread despair. The piece is a good primer to concepts I’ll discuss today:
De-prioritizing caregiving, intimacy and relationships drives burnout & despair
I was someone who prioritized work and engaged in organizing as though it was another job driven by goals of productivity, structure, and efficiency. I didn’t fully understand how being with each other, helping each other survive on a day-to-day basis, engaging in our cultural rituals in community, and building/ deepening/ sustaining reciprocal relationships was all a part of resistance, not something you do after you’ve done “the work”. It’s what allows you to do the work with integrity, accountability and sustainability. Relationship building IS the work of liberation.
The less community one has, the more likely they are to burnout. Hell, the less community we have, the more likely we are to have all types of health issues. We can’t survive alone, how could we possibly organize without meaningful relationships? Isolation literally kills which means community sustains life and supports our capacity struggle, resist and fight. By community I don’t simply mean a “network” of contacts or acquaintances but a web of interdependent, reciprocal, diverse relationships that support our day-to-day survival. The foundation of sustainable organizing is doing the work WITH people you are surviving & struggling with. Each brick we lay in building that collectivist community structure, the freer we are.
Lesson #1: We need to prioritize relationship building within organizing spaces.
The most powerful revolutionary change has always come from collectives made of people that care deeply about each other, understand each other, and fight alongside each other. You don’t have to be best friends with everyone you organize with but the goal is to be a community and to do that you need to put time, labor and energy into building relationships as PART of organizing.
Often, movements in the west embody values of the capitalist/ colonial systems they are seeking to dismantle— there is a fixation on productivity and getting things done while relationship building, emotional vulnerability and cultural practices are deprioritized. People organize together for months without knowing details about each other’s lives. Goal-oriented meetings, task lists, action planning and DOING are seen as important while spending time together for the sake of building intimacy is often at best seen as an optional activity or at worst, completely overlooked. A group that doesn’t know each other or care for each other is a group that is always at the brink of burnout and collapse. It is only a matter of time.
Isolation is a real tool that states & empires use to maintain oppression. These systems leverage loneliness for exploitation. This fragmentation and separation is reflected in organizing spaces that lack meaningful connection and liberating friendships which I believe create most of the early symptoms of burnout— mistrust, paranoia, lack of communication, excessively frequent & unresolved conflicts that don’t enable collective growth, ego-driven behaviors, lack of consistency and commitment, chronic labor inequities, etc. In general, it makes the collective un-resilient and prone to collapse due to inevitable external stressors even like state repression.
Practical tip: Create shared rituals and collectivist infrastructure to prioritize spending time together. It may not be intuitive in the west for people to just KNOW that organizing is about community building and practicing love.
Can the group commit to spending time together regularly? Once a month? Once a week? Start somewhere and work your way up. Can you do something simple like cook, eat, do chores, clean, just exist together and intentionally try to learn more about each other’s background, childhood, and life experiences? I think it helps to ask yourself how well you know the people you organize with— do you know what boulders they carry on their back? What makes them happy, sad, angry, afraid or tired? What gives them hope? What is their relationship with their biological family and how did their childhood environment shape them? What are their coping mechanisms under capitalism/ colonialism? What are they struggling with most right now and what gives them joy?
Try sharing these things about yourself and intentionally, consciously, purposefully try to understand the human being next to you. It’s important. That connection exponentially increases the capacity of the collective and it will help you navigate conflict in regenerative ways, catalyze more seamless communication & collaboration, and lead to the most innovative organizing ideas. Friendships will help you show up on the days when the matrix has the greatest hold on you. The more you practice caring for each other, the harder it will be for the state to infiltrate, disrupt and destroy the collective via repressive tactics.
Strong relationships are the molecules that make up strong communities and strong communities are free. That should be our guiding light. Interdependence. To lay the soil for collective liberation, we need to build liberating relationships today where we enact and practice the values of the world we are building. The more we depend on each other for survival, the less we depend on the state and the more ungovernable we become. This is the fight. In the process of building life-sustaining relationships, we will dismantle systems, not the other way around.
Lesson #2: Organizing is about taking measured risks. The stronger your relational bonds, the more resilient you collectively are in the face of state repression instead of being immobilized.
If you are doing this right, you will face repression. Pushing back against oppressive systems is an inherently risky process. You can assess, mitigate and manage risks but when we are isolated, trying to be “independent”, afraid to be vulnerable or ask for help, not relying on community and bottling up our anxieties, paranoia begins to define risk assessment. We need to learn to work with risks the best we can and build in security/ safety protocols that maximize the impact of our work while protecting us the best we can. But, fighting for liberation is about giving up a lot of comfort and privilege to do what needs to be done. However, the more individualist our thinking is, the more vulnerable we are as a collective. Also, risk assessment needs to be intersectional and acknowledge the differential layers of marginalization among the group. Some people have less of a safety net and have a lot more to lose. Take those intricacies into consideration. Justice is equity, not equality.
Lesson #3: Create intentional containers for regular communal grieving and emotional processing
Because organizing in the west is often fixated on productivity and doing with the simultaneous lack of collectivist traditions anchoring people, there is a severe lack of spaces for people to simply grieve, mourn and fall apart together. Collectivist organizing is about oscillating between falling apart and pulling your s**t together because you have to. However, if we avoid emotional processing in community and suppress or pretend it is not affecting us, then it absolutely will consume us and negatively impact our health in avoidable ways. We were NOT meant to spend this much time in our heads. We were meant to think, feel and process things in community all the time.
Unprocessed grief, sorrow and rage will eventually also seep into and bias our organizing decisions which will take a toll on the collective. For example, I am more likely to make decisions rooted in fear and paranoia if I have not processed my emotions around the escalating state and institutional repression I’ve been facing for Palestine related organizing like many around the world. Create grief rituals and intentional spaces for people to share their feelings, be witnessed, held in community and to work through difficulties by problem solving together (yes, even the “personal stuff”). This is a critical aspect of sustainable organizing.
Practical tip: As part of thinking through organizational infrastructure, build in agreements on how the group will be accountable to prioritizing emotional resilience. Don’t just assume it will happen. The status quo under capitalism/ colonialism is individualism, self-centeredness and dissociation so it requires intention to operate against all that as a collective.
How can you create intentional spaces for people to process their fears and insecurities? How can you prevent excessive fear-based decision making? Can you create opportunities for people to fall apart, vent, cry, scream, process or simply feel together so that their decisions can be rooted in community care? How can we give each other strength in moments of distress? How can we help each other feel brave and capable in the face of endless intimidation and fear mongering? How can we remain steadfast even in the face of brutality to do what needs to be done for our people to one day be free? How can we oscillate between militant, strategic, systems-focused action and community care?
Lesson # 4: Lay the soil. Organizing is about building sustainable foundations.
Mobilizing and organizing are two different things. It takes time to build collective power. It takes work to lay the soil, sow seeds and nurture a plant (the organizing) before we harvest the sustenance that it yields (the mobilizing). Mobilizing is the rapid responses our communities rally up to react to emergent attacks from oppressive systems. It is a reaction. Organizing is proactively building community power and capacity (informed by the past and present) to effectively mobilize.
To some extent, we are mobilizing all the time because the stressors of capitalism/ colonial never end. When groups are created in response to increased violence (or increased mass visibility of violence), then that is a form of mobilizing. However, it is critical to slow down, think about sustainability and build in resilient structures that ensure your group/ collective/ community’s longevity. If you harvest more than the care put in to make sure the soil is fertile, then some sort of collapse is inevitable.
Practical tip: Set aside hangouts and dedicated time to discuss how you want a collective to be structured and processes to make planning + decision making more effective & equitable.
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