Care is political. Care is sacred. Care is relational. Care is liberatory practice.

Building on the lineage of revolutionary care praxis that has been at the heart of global justice movements, Elemental, Oxfam Novib, and Digital Narrative Studio have come together to facilitate an exploration that asks: what does care look like when it is not a response to harm? And how might we resource proactive care practices that strengthen our movements and prefigure the world we long for?

This funding and learning collaboration seeks to promote the right to leisure/pleasure for narrative workers connected to climate justice and examine the value of rest in the context of everyday, mundane, unglamorous ways of thinking and being that move us toward systemic transformation. It is an experiment in collective and co-creative methods, practices, and approaches that challenge deeply held beliefs about care, identify and articulate what care looks like and where it is needed, and provide insights on how to fund practices in ways that build shared structures that enable care.

Work In Progress

In Year One (2025), we facilitated a ‘learn-by-doing’ co-design process in which 10 narrative workers who contribute to climate justice and global movements were each given €2,500 in unrestricted funding to participate in a Rest Residency that enabled them to ‘pause’ in a self-determined way. The Rest Residents/co-designers were selected by lottery (in acknowledgement that everyone is deserving of care) from a pool of nominees generated by the organizing team in alignment with minimal eligibility/ineligibility criteria. 

The process began with a Design Session in which co-designers cultivated relationships with each other and the organizing team, surfaced enabling and disabling conditions for proactive care practices on individual and collective levels in a movement context, shared ideas on how they might engage in the Rest Residency and what they hoped it might allow for them and their community, and offered initial thinking and ideation on the design of the Pause Fund.

Following the Rest Residency, the co-designers reconvened for a Reflection Session where they engaged in collective sensemaking through story sharing; conversation about insights, questions, and realizations that emerged during the experience; and intention setting around how to integrate new learning and build on the proactive care practices they’d begun adopting moving forward. The session also included grounded recommendations for process refinements that will carry forward the intentionality, care, and depth of the experience for future Rest Residents.

We will share the details of the Rest Residents’ experiences in a story collection (Ten Ways to Pause Care-fully) that will provide practical examples of proactive care practices, begin to articulate a shared analysis of what care looks like when it is not a response to harm and in different contexts, and invite funders into transformational methods for resourcing this vital aspect of movement infrastructure and worldbuilding that are generated by narrative workers and their communities.

In Year Two (2026), we will make refinements to the Pause Fund’s approach in accordance with the co-designers recommendations. This includes a process by which the first cohort of Rest Residents will be given the opportunity to nominate narrative workers connected to climate justice for the second cohort, and self-selected members of the first cohort will serve as guides for the second cohort by sharing their experiences in the Rest Residency and the design and reflection sessions, and conveying how they made decisions about what their Rest Residency would look like so that it reflected care for themselves and their communities.

As the Pause Fund continues, we will compile and make accessible a repository of care practices that strengthen movements, which narrative workers can use as a source of inspiration for the types of ‘pauses’ they might routinely take and that funders can use to determine how to incorporate resourcing for this work in their own grantmaking. We will also document and share our learning about the principles and practices for resourcing this work and considerations for what to avoid.

Who We Are

Elemental is a funder learning and grantmaking initiative that was born from the imaginations of movement leaders, narrative practitioners, and funders whose lived experience and professional expertise are reflected in our mandate to: cultivate conditions to resource narrative power.

Oxfam Novib’s Tipping Point project supports young climate activists across the world to build their own knowledge and skills for influencing and movement strengthening through funding, training, campaigns, and networks.

Digital Narratives Studio, housed at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, is a collaborative, iterative, and provocative space to research, produce, and amplify the possibilities of hopeful action through narrative change.

To learn more, contact us at: connect@elementalnarratives.com