Weaving Care offers a path for anyone interested in forming a care-driven community that fosters welcoming and earnest relationships. This playbook is designed to support in an open and dynamic process to:
Develop a community identity and sense of belonging.
Build and expand a community beyond its geographical location.
Develop abilities, qualities, and capacities for a local hands-on decolonial practice of hospitality.
Encourage a decommodified practice of care.
The playbook is made up of two parts that come together to provide a pathway to foster a community of care.
Part 1: Foundational Framework (Read)
The Foundational Framework offers the background info to understand care and how to weave it when forming a community. It is made up of two sections:
Understanding Community: a brief overview of what a community entails.
Our Approach to Care: explains the holistic understanding of care that this playbook is based on and how to visualize it in the formation of the social fabric of the community.
Part 2: Implementation (Do)
Implementation offers the structure and activities to follow to start consolidating a community of care. It is made up of two sections:
The Threads of a Community of Care: sets the infrastructure necessary to foster a community of care, providing a series of key elements that must be present in a community-building effort.
Activity Lab: a series of guidelines, mindsets, themes, and tools to design community activities that are diverse, engaging, and conscious of the Care ethos.
It is strongly encouraged that you first read the Foundational Framework, and then explore the Implementation sections. This way you’ll become conscious of elements that may be overlooked when fostering care.
Weaving Care is not meant to be a strict rulebook or universal step-by-step process. Instead, it should be thought of as a starting point for building intuition and sensibility as to what a community of care may entail and how to create the conditions to promote one. This means the provided pathway is one approach to developing a community of care, yet as these dimensions are dynamic and dependent on context, you are encouraged to modify or adapt the elements of this playbook as needed.
Whether starting this process from scratch or bringing new dynamics into an existing community, this playbook can be used by anyone (collectives or individuals) with a forward-thinking and care-driven mentality. Carrying out this process with partners from the beginning is suggested since the formation of a community of care is a collective activity and is strengthened through the contributions of multiple perspectives.
