As an Arts & Cultural Strategy project of the Othering & Belonging Institute, Cultures of Care has multiple goals. As noted, care is essential to creating belonging. But how does this project help us get there?

Our most broad goal is that you will leave this project inspired to reflect on, reclaim the value of, expand upon and celebrate your own community and collective practices of care. We hope this project gives you and yours a little juice—an energy bump—to re-center and reclaim care. Through this door, we hope to spark much larger conversations about what it means to center care.

Our second goal is the deeper study and application of the collective care wisdom within each profile and of care itself. Through teasing out key provocations, the learning guides, videos and podcasts, we invite you to dig in as is most applicable to your work. For example:

• We invite public health researchers to explore the intersections of culture, social connection and care as protective health factors.
• We invite policymakers and philanthropists alike to think about how to support the social and economic conditions that create thriving, organic cultures of care.
• We invite educators to bring discussions on care into their classrooms as a way to discuss race, gender, history, and labor, among other topics in the learning guides.
• We invite organizers and narrative strategists to think about care as a powerful organizing politic and narrative frame that bridges identity and spheres of life.
• We invite pertinent staff in organizations to use the learning guides and videos to open space for talking about care as a way to create belonging in workplaces.