Systemic Resources
Advocates/Services
Othering and Belonging Institute.
WE ALL BELONG IN THE CIRCLE OF HUMAN CONCERN. Othering is the problem of our time. Belonging is the solution.
The Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley advances groundbreaking approaches to transforming structural marginalization and inequality. We are scholars, organizers, communicators, researchers, artists, and policymakers committed to building a world where all people belong
Cultures of Care celebrates people that practice collective care in unconventional and insurgent ways. Care is an essential, immediate and practical way to create belonging. Perhaps most vitally in our urgent times, at the heart of each profile you will find provocations that are seeds for reshaping society and how we relate to each other and the world.
Cultures of Care was initiated in the fall of 2020 as we faced a deepening pandemic and economic inequality, popular uprisings against state-sanctioned violence against Black people, an expanding border wall and a deluge of traumatic climate events. These conditions continue to grow today. In the chaos, isolation and fear of these multiple storms, we also witness beautiful points of shelter. These practices center an ethos of collective care in the face of multiple forms of overlapping othering and oppression. Some of these are new and emergent, like harnessing technology to adapt to social isolation. Others are long-standing, such as stewarding ancestral lands through fire. Most, if not all, are an evolving mix of new and old ways to practice collective care. Cultures of Care are practices that create belonging in the context of othering. A Culture of Care is an affirmative, generative form of resistance and adaptation.
Promoting “a transition from a world of domination and extraction to a world of regeneration, resilience, and interdependence…grounded in four elements…: leading with audacious vision and bold purpose; deeply embodying the values at the heart of the vision; building radical and deep community around the vision; and using all of that…to strategically navigate toward the future…. cultivating a practice of taking care of each other…. How can we develop the collective strength and insight needed to transform a culture and an economy built on racism and domination?… How can we cultivate our readiness to engage…. A movement that can transform the world and each one of us in it…. Who do we need to be to make that change?… We, individually and collectively, would need to be different as people…. Changing ourselves individually and collectively will change the world…. Collective transformative practice as the intentional and continuously repeated action undertaken as a group to cultivate new ways of being and thinking in that group and beyond it…. Encourages people in a group to discover and unleash their core strengths.”
Center for Partnership Studies.
The mission of the Center for Partnership Systems is to catalyze movement towards partnership systems on all levels of society through research, education, grassroots empowerment, and policy initiatives. CPS’s programs focus on promoting human rights and nonviolence, gender and racial equity, child development, and new metrics that demonstrate the financial contribution of the work of care. We draw from the latest social and biological science including neuroscience, connecting the dots between the personal and political to address root causes rather than merely symptoms of dysfunction and injustice. The Center for Partnership Studies was founded in 1987 in response to the demand of readers of Riane Eisler's The Chalice and The Blade: Our History, Our Future.”
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