Collective care
Care is political and the research showed the importance of collective care in the context of exhausting work across all sites.
Caring for each other is instrumental in sustaining individual lives, and the movement as a whole. The movements demonstrated that the only way to continue their work over decades, as they have done, was to take care of themselves as individuals and as a collective.
For example, in Nicaragua, women activated their pre-existing feminist networks at the local, national or international levels and developed new networks of a humanitarian nature in order to respond to the urgent needs of the direct and indirect victims of the repression. In Australia, care frameworks are embedded within Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing, such as kinship systems (see Gurrutu in Galiwinku Women's Space) and this includes caring for Country.
“We were doing the more humanitarian work there. So, it was like looking for and obtaining provisions, cooking and taking food for the youngsters, certain medical supplies, bicarbonate for the teargas, white vinegar; anything we could find that we knew could be of use to them…”