Self-care. Healing. Wellness. Resilience. Over the last few years, these have all become unavoidable words in social movement spaces, as organizers and organizational leaders look for ways to navigate a multitude of crisis conditions. We believe that an organization’s ability to be emotionally resilient—and support its staff in being resilient—is equal in importance to the strategy it develops to win structural transformation and the skills it builds to grow and exert its power.
Last year, Maurice Mitchell’s “Building Resilient Organizations” was published near the end of a pilot program called Resilient Futures that we launched last spring at the Organizing Center (OC). Centering resilience to better empower organizers and base-building organizations, Resilient Futures is a program for Black, Brown, and Asian organizers and directors from the same organization. The program is intended to support organizers’ personal and professional well-being—and ultimately sustain collective resistance for the long term...
Read the rest of this article in The Forge to find out more abour what we've learned through our Resilient Futures cohort.