Creating the conditions for opencare: in for the long haul
Hi @gehan it is a pleasure to meet you, welcome!
I’ve heard great things about the work in Glasgow from Nadia, and would be interested in zooming in this overarching care theme during our festival later in the year. The reason for me personally is obvious: being a community manager here at edgeryders, the core of my work goes into creating the conditions for care, in a community and organisation: whether it’s trying to forge new relationships and learning, creating meaningful work for those of us not willing to compromise to an exploitative job market but needing to find resilience in precarity, or just being on the margins somehow socioeconomically but also health wise, or culturally. I realise more and more how ambitious this is and how we need to be in it for decades to understand how it can shift things broadly, culturally or in policy, like you say - doing things differently, rewiring ourselves etc.
Some projects and wonderful people I know which you might want to consider connecting with, mainly because they go deep into rewiring communities:
- Woodbine Health Autonomy Center in nyc (meet @Woodbinehealth !) collective and info/educational center asserting the need to regain control over our health, move away from institutionalized healthcare which addresses only localised, symptomatic problems in the paradigm of the individualist modern society. They are pretty up front: "We do not reject modern methods of medicine, but rather recognize the need to detach the knowledge from the oppressive institutions that guard it."
- Access Space in Sheffield, and more so @James who was part of the early group and now moved on to doing something else. The space is a digital lab and computer repair workshop (and a lot of creative activities!) which provided skills and potential for greater inclusion for thousands of people at the margins of the socioeconomic spectrum. The social cohesion returns at the community level seemed to be outstanding too. Again, what stayed with me over the years is this very uncompromising view: "We realise now that the most valuable technology that is being discarded by our society is PEOPLE. We are seeing talented, skilled people unmobilised, and we think that this is a criminal waste."
- The Book of Community by @lasindias - a South American - Spanish and cosmopolitan collective focusing on productive economic work : I appreciated this running the long race and coming up with deep insights about how communities learn together first and foremost, even before claiming to produce ambitious aims or solve societal issues. Change is in the very fabric of our relationships.. they say it much more eloquently than I can, of course!