The People’s Care Agenda
Building the Conditions for Collective Life
The People’s Care Agenda begins with a simple belief. People deserve more than survival. Our communities deserve the conditions to live with dignity, stability, safety, connection, joy, and collective power.
We believe care is the foundation of healthy communities and a thriving democracy. Without access to housing, food, healthcare, transportation, rest, safety, and community, people are pushed into exhaustion, displacement, isolation, and crisis. These conditions are not inevitable. They are the result of political and economic choices that prioritize extraction over people and profit over community.
The Care Agenda is our collective response.
Rooted in the leadership, lived experience, and political vision of women and nonbinary people of color, it connects everyday struggles to the larger systems shaping our lives. It is both a vision for the future and an organizing framework for building it.
Reading the Care Agenda is an invitation to act. Every conversation, relationship, campaign, and act of collective care helps build the communities we deserve. The Care Agenda asks one guiding question. What does it take for our communities to truly live and thrive?
Care as Public Infrastructure
Care is often treated as private labor or an individual responsibility. We reject that idea. Care is public infrastructure. It is what allows people to participate in community life, develop leadership, care for one another, and build collective power.
Communities thrive when public resources support affordable housing, healthcare, childcare, transportation, mutual aid, healing spaces, food systems, green space, youth development, elder care, libraries, cultural institutions, and community-based care networks. These investments strengthen communities while creating the conditions for participation, belonging, and democracy.
The Care Agenda calls us to organize for public investment that strengthens communities rather than systems that extract from them.
Collective Responsibility and Interdependence
No one survives alone. Our communities have always relied on mutual aid, shared caregiving, cooperative economics, cultural traditions, and collective responsibility to sustain one another through hardship and change.
The Care Agenda builds on this legacy. We believe leadership should be shared, decisions should be made collectively, and communities should have the resources to care for one another with dignity.
Collective responsibility is more than helping one another through a crisis. It is building the relationships, trust, and institutions that allow communities to solve problems together and shape their own future. This work asks each of us to move beyond individual survival and invest in the well-being of the whole community.
Healing, Rest, and Joy Build Strong Communities
Our members made clear that exhaustion is political. Many people are carrying the weight of economic insecurity, caregiving, violence, displacement, racism, and burnout while being expected to continue functioning without support.
We believe healing is not separate from organizing. Communities heal when people build relationships, participate in collective action, create culture together, and experience a sense of belonging. Organizing reduces isolation, strengthens trust, and creates opportunities for people to transform grief, anger, and fear into collective action. Rest, creativity, celebration, cultural expression, and intergenerational connection are not distractions from movement building. They sustain it.
The Care Agenda creates space for people to recover, imagine, and lead while building communities rooted in hope, love, dignity, and shared humanity.
Community Safety Through Care and Collective Protection
We believe safety grows through connection, stability, accountability, and collective care. Communities are safest when people have housing, food, healthcare, meaningful relationships, economic security, and opportunities to resolve conflict without violence.
Too often, public systems respond to community needs with policing, surveillance, punishment, and militarization rather than investment in the conditions that prevent harm. These approaches deepen instability while failing to address the root causes of violence.
The Care Agenda calls for divestment from militarism, the end of police militarization, and the transformation of public resources toward resilient
community infrastructure. We support investments in affordable housing, mental health care, violence prevention, youth development, restorative and transformative justice practices, public health, environmental resilience, mutual aid, and community-led safety initiatives.
Community accountability means creating structures where people can address harm, repair relationships, and strengthen trust without relying solely on punishment or criminalization.
Building safety begins by building stronger communities.
Housing, Economic Dignity, and Community Stability
Housing is a human need, not a commodity. Every person deserves a safe, affordable place to live and the economic stability necessary to remain rooted in their community.
Housing instability, displacement, and economic insecurity result from systems that prioritize profit over people. These conditions undermine health, participation, and democracy while forcing families into a constant struggle for survival.
The Care Agenda supports living wages, affordable housing, tenant protections, cooperative ownership, community land stewardship, worker and consumer cooperatives, accessible childcare, transportation, healthcare, and food security. Economic systems should strengthen communities, expand opportunity, and allow people to participate fully in civic life rather than extract wealth from the places where they live.
Community Governance and Shared Power
Communities should have the power to shape the conditions of their own lives. The people most affected by decisions should help make those decisions.
The Care Agenda supports democratic participation through community assemblies, resident leadership, participatory budgeting, cooperative ownership, member-led governance, and shared stewardship of community resources.
Leadership exists within every person. Our role is to cultivate the conditions in which people develop confidence, share responsibility, and build collective power. Democracy becomes meaningful when communities participate directly in shaping the policies, institutions, and investments that affect their daily lives.
Stewardship of Land and Future Generations
Care extends beyond people to include our relationship with land, water, food, and future generations.
Healthy communities require clean air, clean water, accessible green space, healthy food systems, climate resilience, and sustainable stewardship of shared resources. Environmental justice is inseparable from racial, economic, and health justice because environmental harm falls disproportionately on communities already facing disinvestment and inequality.
The Care Agenda supports regenerative practices, community gardens, local food systems, environmental restoration, and cultural relationships to land that strengthen both community and ecological well-being. Our responsibility is not simply to protect what exists today, but to build communities future generations can inherit with dignity.
What the Care Agenda Calls Us to Build
The Care Agenda is more than a statement of values. It is a political framework for organizing, leadership development, political education, and community action. It calls us to:
- Build relationships before a crisis.
- Organize for public investment instead of austerity.
- Strengthen democratic participation and community governance.
- Defend one another against displacement, criminalization, and violence.
- Practice mutual aid, accountability, and collective care every day.
Most importantly, it calls us to build the collective power necessary to transform the systems shaping our lives. The future we seek will not be created by institutions alone. It will be built by communities that organize together, govern together, care for one another, and refuse to leave anyone behind.
