ABSTRACT
“Feminist Burnout and Sustainability” addresses the common struggle with burnout that many social justice leaders face when they remain informed about social justice issues and work for change on every front. The chapter offers practices to help us prevent burnout and ones to move us out of a deep despair into a more proactive stance. It discusses the importance of self-care while critiquing the popularized consumerist self-care models; instead, this chapter moves toward communities of care.
If we are really to create long-term, structural social transformation, we need to engage in sustainable social justice work. This chapter, then, also offers ways for “making movement work healing work,” as the activist B. Loewe suggests. How can we relate to ourselves, to one another, and to social justice work in healing, life-giving, and sustainable ways, so that burnout is less likely and so that we can be resilient and creative enough to imagine new possibilities?
