What is Community Care?
Community care is the practice of tending to one another’s needs through collective action, shared responsibility, and mutual support networks. It stands in deliberate contrast to mainstream narratives of self-care that frame wellness as an individual, often consumer-driven pursuit. Rather than asking isolated individuals to purchase their way to health, community care recognizes that wellbeing is fundamentally relational and that our liberation is bound together.
Community care is the practice of showing up for others and allowing others to show up for you, in ways that are consistent, mutual, and rooted in collective liberation. It encompasses everything from cooking a meal for a sick neighbor to organizing mutual aid networks during crisis, from creating accessible spaces to building care webs that redistribute resources based on need rather than market logic.
Origins & Lineage
Community care has no single founder or origin point. Its practices are ancient, rooted in how marginalized communities have always ensured collective survival when institutions failed them. Indigenous communities around the world have practiced reciprocal community care for millennia as part of a core belief in the interconnectedness of people and the earth. Caring for each other and the land is critical to everyone’s wellbeing and was also practiced as a means for survival during colonization.
In the United States, in the late 1700s, recently freed African Americans were still denied access to banks and social safety nets. So, they pooled money to buy farms and land, care for children, the sick, and the entire community. The 1793 Yellow Fever Epidemic in Philadelphia saw members of the Free African Society mobilize to take care of the city’s ailing population while white elites fled, only to be vilified and accused of committing theft and fraud after the crisis had passed.
The term mutual aid was coined by Russian anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin in a collection of anthropological essays published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries countering prevailing theories of social Darwinism. The most well-known example is the work of the Black Panther Party, who created the Free Breakfast program, which provided meals to low-income children, as well as a system of community health clinics. During the AIDS crisis in the United States, many LGBT+ groups started mutual aid networks to provide medical care, support groups, and political activism when the government chose to ignore the community.
The contemporary framing of “community care” as distinct from “self-care” gained traction in disability justice and activist circles during the 2010s. Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice is a collection of essays by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha published in 2018. This text became foundational in articulating community care as political praxis, though the 2019 social media post by Nakita Valerio—“Shouting ‘self-care’ at people who actually need ‘community care’ is how we fail people”—crystallized the phrase for broader audiences.
How It’s Practiced
Community care takes myriad forms, scaled to need and context. It can be intimate and local: cleaning for a friend who is going through a tough time, donating to mutual aid efforts or getting to know (and helping out) your neighbors. It can be infrastructural: organizing childcare collectives, establishing care webs for chronically ill community members, or creating accessible spaces that center disabled people’s needs.
Care webs are groups of individuals (who may be disabled, able-bodied/not disabled, or a mixture) who work together to provide care and access to resources for each other. Creating care webs shifts the idea of access and care of all kinds (disability, child, economic) from collective to collective while working through the raced, classed, gendered aspects of access and care.
In practice, community care also involves shifting our organizations to be ones where people feel fine if they get sick, cry, have needs, start late because the bus broke down, move slower, ones where there’s food at meetings, people work from home – and these aren’t things we apologize for. It requires examining who is expected to provide care (often feminized, racialized labor), who is deemed worthy of receiving it, and how to build sustainable systems that don’t replicate burnout.
The likelihood that institutional structures will meet our most basic needs varies dramatically along the lines of race, class, gender, sexuality and ability — and when those institutions fail, being able to depend on community care is a matter of life and death. Mutual aid, eviction defense, jail support and more can be vital forms of community care.
Community Care Today
Conscious and spiritual communities increasingly frame community care as a foundational practice. Workshops, circles, and retreats now explicitly address building care networks, establishing boundaries within collective care, and moving beyond extractive models of community that mirror capitalist exploitation.
The COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed an explosion of community care organizing, from neighborhood mutual aid networks to care pods and quarantine support groups. While some of these efforts have waned, the framework persists in transformative justice spaces, abolitionist organizing, climate justice work, and disability justice movements.
Seekers encounter community care in facilitated care-mapping exercises, in calls for resource redistribution within spiritual communities, in land-based practices that honor interdependence, and in the increasing recognition that individual healing cannot be separated from collective liberation. Teachers of somatics, embodiment practices, and liberatory frameworks now routinely name community care as essential to sustainable practice.
Common Misconceptions
Community care is not charity. Mutual aid defies the hierarchies and white saviourism inherent to charity, instead asking us to share our skills and resources in order to decentralize community care, and help one another break free from capitalism and colonial authority. It is based on solidarity and reciprocity, not benevolence from those with more toward those with less.
Community care does not mean abandoning self-care or martyring oneself for the collective. Rather, it reframes self-care as inseparable from collective wellbeing. As Audre Lorde articulated, caring for oneself is an act of political warfare—but it is done in service of sustaining collective struggle, not escaping it.
Community care is not always comfortable or convenient. It requires confronting how ableism, racism, capitalism, and other systems shape who is expected to care and who receives care. It asks us to redistribute resources, acknowledge interdependence, and challenge toxic individualism.
Community care is not a replacement for systemic change. Community care is a part of how we get structural change. Failing to provide those forms of care severely limits who can fight for structural change. It is both survival strategy and movement infrastructure.
How to Begin
Read: Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) and Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) by Dean Spade (2020) provide essential frameworks.
Map your networks: Use care-mapping tools to identify who you give care to, who cares for you, where gaps exist, and what resources flow through your relationships. The Barnard Center for Research on Women and Sins Invalid both offer free care-mapping resources.
Start small and local: Offer tangible support to one person in your community who is struggling. Cook a meal, offer rides, provide childcare, share money. Notice what comes up—guilt, saviorism, transactionality—and examine it.
Join existing networks: Seek out mutual aid groups, care collectives, or community fridges in your area. Participate as both giver and receiver to build the muscle of interdependence.
Challenge individualism in spiritual spaces: If you participate in conscious or spiritual communities, ask how they resource people in crisis, whether accessibility is centered, and if care labor is equitably distributed. Advocate for structural changes that embed community care into organizational culture.