Realigning with Collective Care and the Commons to Forge Feminist Futures

With María Alejandra Escalante and Maytik Avirama Pabon

This moment is asking us to step up and hear the calling from our ecosystems. We are at a moment where we really need to examine relationship with ourselves, the land and the non-human. Some ecosystems are bound to collapse and it is important to acknowledge that and to incorporate regeneration in our dreams and actions towards feminist futures.

In this wonderful, wisdom-packed conversation with Maria Alejandra and Maytik we are invited to remember and ground on the fact that we are connected to the web of life. That our bodies and what happens to them is in direct relationship to what happens to the land and viceversa. Both the pain and damage as well as the opportunity to heal. Thus, the importance to cultivate presence, to listen to what our bodies and land are asking of us and to realign towards collective care, ecological regeneration and joyful relationships.

Our bodies and the commons have been exploited, commodified, monetized and confined to borders. It is time to reclaim them and practice + imagine ways that can strengthen them and move us regeneration. For this, Maytik and Maria Alejandra posed some critical questions for us to consider:

  • What are our feminist principles of consumption? How might we re-establish our relationship with the consumption of natural resources?

  • How might we common resources & energy production in ways that can allow regeneration?

  • What can circular economies look like?

  • How do we structure our economies and ecologies to create and exist in a more livable place? 

  • How do we reorganize and build structures around the collective care structures vs. individualization and for profit world?

Related to funding:

  • What woudl it look like if, as feminist and grassroots organizers, we had the resources, the leadership, power and space to recreate the relationships with technologies, with non human world and with the living world? Plus the ability to recreate systems of care?

  • Wealth is not the only power, but is a power that needs to get liberated. We need to find ways as feminist to common the resource of wealth. How do we embed the idea of collective ownership of wealth and power distribution in philanthropy?

There is a lot of pain in the world right now. And care might be seen as tending to that pain. But care is also about cultivating relationships and joy. Resisting the idea that we must do everything alone. From domination to reciprocity, from loneliness to collective, from extractive to regenerative. So we are invited to:

  • Slow down to Prioritize the foundation of life… vs. production

  • Re-evaluate our own relationships and priorities.

  • Honoring ourselves.

  • Hold attention and care as our compass

  • To hold justice, beauty and devotion for life. 

Healing is also reclaiming our capacity to dream. Its a necessity its not a luxury. 

Watch the recording of this incredible conversation here!

Imagine you can listen through each of our pores. That you have antennas all over the body. Expand your listening.
What might we hear from the land if we listen attentively? Of how we can help the land?
— Maytik
With the information we have now and in our ancestral memories around the web of life, how do we structure our economies and ecologies to envision a more livable place?
How do we organize around the matters that matter to us : ecological regeneration, joyful relationships?
— Maria Alejandra