Image description: A block print style circular illustration depicting two cupped hands framed by a small leafy branch above and below them. This image is to illustrate the concept of People Care.

What's People Care got to do with it?

🙌 Brazilian environmentalist and trade unionist Chico Mendes famously said, "Environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening." This acknowledges that to be effective in our ecological work, we must also challenge the underlying social structures which allowed for the imbalances and destruction to occur in the first place.

🌱 Let’s slow down to grow more. How can we make spaces for people to pause, reflect and consider their growth and their future?

🕸 We spend such a vast portion of our waking time at work, so our work provides us with an amazing opportunity to develop positive, healthy structures and processes that focus on allowing people to flourish.

🔺 Power is important to consider, name, and observe. We might notice ‘power-over’ in our cultural spaces: where certain people have more ability to make decisions or access resource. 'Power-with’ is where power and decision making is shared in partnership and collaboration. 'Power-from-within' is when people have legitimate power that they can draw on within themselves. We can ask ourselves, how can we create governance structures where those affected by the decision are able to have meaningful input on those decisions? How can we move from needing to 'empower', to creating spaces where people have legitimate power in the first place?

💭 How can we create the conditions for each individual in our network to ‘come alive’ and unleash their potential?

🧬 By focusing less on ‘productivity’ and more on the health of our social systems, we can create spaces where everyone can discover their uniqueness and their potential.

This week's challenge.

This week’s challenge comes from Alexandra from nRhythm. Alexandra encourages us to consider how we can take inspiration from living systems and bring this into our life and work.

What could it mean to shift from productivity to health? Many of us are so familiar with the drive and desire to produce - almost like our bodies and minds are human factories, churning out material. This could be completing administrative tasks at work, completing various house chores, or ticking off errands on your to-do list.

Productivity can feel good and can help us feel like we are ‘getting things done’. In reality, human bodies and minds are not machines, and we can learn from the 'small and slow solutions' that the living world can teach us. If we can balance 'getting things done' with taking time to pause and reflect, this can offer us the opportunity to build our own capacities, becoming more creative and content in ourselves and our teams.

Where do you notice opportunities for this in your life? What untapped potential could you bring about by taking time for building your own health and capacity? What's one step that you could take this week to do so?