Intertidal Lab

Putting wellbeing at the heart of movement building

Choosing care, rest, and collective wellbeing right now is not indulgent, it is resistance. Protecting our capacity to care and feel deeply is a radical political act.

In the face of war, genocide, ecological collapse, creeping authoritarianism and widespread burnout, the question isn’t only how do we keep going? But instead, how do we stay human?

Choosing care, rest, and collective wellbeing right now is not indulgent, it is resistance. In a system that profits from our burnout and exploits our empathy, protecting our capacity to care and feel deeply is a radical political act.

As organisers, dreamers, and movement builders, we’re witnessing trauma and holding more pain and grief than ever before. Surveillance, violence, climate collapse, and despair aren’t just events, they are the atmosphere we live and breathe. And the cost? Burnout. Anxiety. Disconnection. Numbness.

This is not sustainable. And it’s not accidental. Today’s authoritarians understand that if they can crush our sense of agency, isolate us, and wear us down, they can win.

The psychosocial cost of autocracy

Authoritarianism isn’t just a structural assault, it is a deeply psychological one. In a Nature Reviews Psychology article, researchers unpack how authoritarian regimes thrive by inducing fear, promoting dehumanisation, and collapsing complexity into us/them binaries.

At the same time civil society is under intensive attack and the psychological impact from being frozen out of funding, increasing restrictions on our work, targeted attacks, threats of violence and imprisonment is immense. Civic space is now seriously restricted in 118 countries, with just 2.1% of the global population living in countries where civic space remains open.

Research confirms what many already feel: sustained activism in the face of repression and climate anxiety causes higher rates of PTSD, depression, insomnia, and somatic distress. A 2022 report by Protect Defenders found that 75% of frontline human rights defenders in conflict zones reported symptoms of chronic stress or trauma. An international survey conducted by the Columbia Human Right Law Review revealed close to 20 percent of people engaged in human rights or civil society experience symptoms of PTSD, compared to the global average of 3.9 percent.

Even more alarming: the survey revealed that over 70% of civil society workers have never received any training or tools to address the mental health toll of activism.

What does this mean for us? That our mental wellbeing is under attack too. And we need tools that strengthen our inner clarity and resilience as much as our organising and collective action. 

Burnout is not just tiredness, it’s heartbreak

Burnout isn’t just tiredness. It’s heartbreak, disillusionment, and overwhelm. And yet we continue to show up, because we know what’s at stake. 

There are many reasons to feel grief right now. Joanna Macy writes about honouring our pain as a way to create deep connections with others and evoke greater clarity of thought in her book Active Hope.

“Don’t apologise for the sorrow, grief and rage you feel. It is a measure of your humanity and maturity. It is a measure of your open heart, and as your heart breaks open there will be room for the world to heal.” 

The grief we feel and the trauma we carry is not only individual. It’s collective, political, and often ancestral.

The New Zealand based Emerge Institute updated the popular system thinking tool the Iceberg Model to encourage us to go deeper in our exploration of systems and include the collective and intergenerational trauma that holds back human potential as part of our effort to understand systems, as well as our connection to the life force of all living things on the planet.

Mapping what’s beneath the surface of burnout, conflict and collapse is part of taking a restorative and healing approach to systems change, bringing inner and outer work together.

Healing is part of the strategy

The personal and political are entangled. Oppression lives in the nervous system. And political healing requires more than individual self-care.

There’s a growing movement to reframe wellbeing as a strategy, not just an outcome. From community-based mental health support in the Global Majority, to trauma-informed facilitation and embodied resistance in Europe and North America, a new wave of “regenerative organising” is taking root.

Sustainable activism means embedding mental health into the very design of our movements. Not just after a crisis, but as a baseline practice.


Attention is power. Where we place it shapes the world.

Our nervous systems are political terrain. Where we focus and how we focus shapes what becomes possible. In her beautiful Substack essay, The Quality of Our Attention, Dimple Dhabalia writes:

“When we recognise that the quality of our attention matters as much as the quantity of our actions, we can show up differently.”

This moment invites us to shift from frantic reaction to spacious presence not to withdraw, but to choose how we show up. To ground our organising in clarity, not panic. In care, not exhaustion.

Let’s take seriously what the far-right never will: joy, tenderness, collective recovery. These are not distractions from the revolution. They are the ground it grows from.

ten (emergence network) is reimagining collective care through the lens of postactivism. What they describe as a practice of slowing down, unlearning, and making space for strange, relational responses to crisis. They create spaces for collective recovery through artistic events and residencies and translocal experiments. Their work reminds us that sometimes the most powerful response isn’t to do more, but to be present in different ways that honour play, mystery, and the intelligence of rest. In their words, they’re “cultivating a commonwealth of bewilderment”, a space where care, not certainty, leads the way.

And it’s time to let go of measuring our worth by our output. To build movements where care is strategy and slowness is skill. Rest is not escape, it’s reparative justice. And Tricia Hersey’s Rest is Resistance offers a visceral reminder: rest is not a luxury, but a lifeline. A portal to liberation. “We must believe we are worthy of rest,” she writes, “we don’t have to earn it. It is our birthright. It is one of our most ancient and primal needs.” Buy or borrow

We don’t need to prove our commitment by breaking ourselves. What we need is to stay in the struggle with our hearts intact and our minds clear. We love Tricia’s Rest Deck as a way to dip into her wisdom about rest on a regular basis.

Care is a collective act

Civil society can’t meet the moment if we don’t care for those doing the work. We are facing a global campaign to silence, fragment, and exhaust us. Our counter-strategy must be to protect our inner lives, build collective capacity, and refuse to abandon joy.

Build slowness into your organising. Normalise asking for help. Make room for laughter. Train up trauma-informed facilitators. Pay people well. Feed people well. Name what hurts. Honour your limits. Find or create spaces where it’s safe to fall apart. Then help others do the same.

Here are a few resources and ideas to support you in your collective work:

  • Normalise checking in on people’s nervous systems, not just deadlines. Here is a regular check-in practice we use as a team and with activists we work with. 
  • Explore wellbeing at the individual, family, organisational and community levels with this practical toolkit and exercises created by Front Line Defenders: Why is wellbeing political? (in Spanish) 
  • Increase organisational resiliency with this practical, field-tested guide from PartnersGlobal and Civicus that offers tools for self-assessment, scenario planning, and strategic action to proactively strengthen your resilience and remain impactful, even in the toughest environments. 
  • Design campaigns and protests with social wellbeing in mind. We love Dr David Rock’s neuroscience-based SCARF model as a framework for thinking about social rewards and threats when designing social interactions and events. 
  • Build care into your funding and strategy. A number of foundations already offer additional funds to non-profit grantees to support individual and collective wellbeing, but there is still a long way to go. Fund the People estimates only 1% of grant dollars go to support staff development in grantee organisations. They offer a toolkit to help you make the case to invest in people in your organisation. 

Civil society is a frontline – it needs reinforcements

These are not individual problems. They require systemic support:

  • Funders need to require strongly encourage CSOs to invest in wellbeing, mental health support, and resilience infrastructure with the same gusto given to monitoring, evaluation and learning.
  • Movements need to build trauma literacy and regenerative practices for organising.
  • Leaders need to model boundaries, care, and courage.

We need movements that feel like sanctuary. Not extraction sites. Because we’re not just fighting fascism. We’re fighting for a world where our bodies are safe, our grief is welcome, and our joy is not a footnote.

If you have resources on mental health, collective care or psychosocial support for movement building, please send them to us. We’re compiling and curating activist-led wellbeing practices from across the globe to be shared openly.