Care & Creativity as Survival Literacies

This opening circle invites us to being where many of us already are: in the midst of the uncertainty, rupture and rapid change. Here, we explore care and creativity as ways people have stayed alive, oriented, connected, and human under conditions that were never meant to sustain them.

Together we will widen our understanding of care beyond the individual and into the collective, cultural and relational practices that have carried people through hunger, displacement, grief, and systemic harm. We will reflect on how creativity often shows up in wound care and healing, resistance, memory, tending. And we will consider how these practices have allowed communities, expecially those at the margins, to endure and respond with intention.

This circle centers shared reflection and dialogue, creating space to name what has helped us survive, what we've learned to carry, and how beginning with care reshapes our understanding of creativity altogether.

Guiding questions include:

1. Where have you witnessed care functioning as a form of survival, resistance or wound care in your life or community?
2. What creative practices, formal or informal, help you make meaning or stay connected during times of overwhelm, uncertainty, or even transition?
3. How might we reimagine creativity to be a practice that keeps us alive and connected?
4. What becomes possible when we name care and creativity as share and interdependent literacies rather than personal traits?