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Summary
At the July Civic Design Community call, hear from Deanna Zandt (she/her). The term "self-care" is thrown around a lot these days but there's a more complicated picture than just taking a bubble bath and hoping for the best. In this call we talk about what's missing from our conversations about self-care. We also discuss how human experience is fundamentally messy, but designers (and coders) like to make everything clean and neat. We've got to start reckoning with that. Our goal is that you walk away with a sense of the care structures that you have and need in your own lives, and a sense of what designing care into our systems could look like. About our speaker: Deanna Zandt is a writer, artist and award-winning technologist living in Brooklyn, NY. She spent 15 years working at the forefront of social justice, technology and media; after she burned out for the third time, she realized that maybe that work didn’t suit her particularly well. Currently, she spends her time: supporting other very impressive people and organizations behind-the-scenes with their technology; writing & drawing when she feels like it; walking and playing with her two dogs and their friends; connecting with humans near and far; and figuring out how to exist with meaning, fulfillment and as many giggles as possible. We’ll be talking (and very likely giggling) about her zine that traverses the constellation of self-soothing, self-care, community care and structural care.
Key Insights
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Burnout led Deanna to rethink integrating values, existence, and care rather than sacrifice and hustle.
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Gen Z and younger generations model healthier, value-aligned approaches to work and care.
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Self-soothing differs from self-care; self-soothing calms immediate distress but doesn't solve root problems.
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Community care involves mutual support creating space for individual self-care and self-soothing.
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Structural care addresses systemic changes enabling genuine care beyond individual effort.
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Capitalism’s exploitative foundations conflict with care; real structural care challenges such economic models.
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Activism led by communities of color already incorporates embedded community and healing practices.
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Multiple roles in social justice work—from direct action to support roles—are all essential and valid.
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Honest emotional experiences, including anger and discouragement, are part of sustainable activism.
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Designing systems and technology must accommodate messy, complicated human realities rather than pushing simplistic positivity.
Notable Quotes
"You can never be sick enough to help the sickest people."
"The hustle does suck, and we’re doing this other thing over here, arranging ourselves in healthier ways."
"Self-care became this kind of commodity like, if you just take a bubble bath, you’ll be able to face another day in this capitalist nightmare."
"Everybody does better when everybody does better."
"Human experience is messy and nuanced and gets complicated and is confusing."
"You get to decide what the ways that you support these things are."
"If you’re ever made to feel like that role is not important, that is not a group you want to be working with."
"There’s no insignificant work in social justice movements."
"Capitalism is founded on exploitation and is antithetical to care."
"Sometimes things change in a heartbeat because one person goes You know, like that’s all it took."
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