Community Self-Care

Through community self-care, we work to respond to crises and challenges with shared determination and vision, and to attend to needs as they arise to the best of our ability. We recognize and attend to the ongoing, dynamic, and mutually relevant needs, gifts, resources, dreams, and challenges among us given the contexts of the criminal legal system and economic insecurity.

Through cultivating Circle-based practices that bring together care and accountability, we are creating, fortifying, and connecting with structures of support to confront the onslaught of systematic oppression, exploitation, and violence faced in our communities and individual lives.

Community self-care deepens understandings and practices of restorative justice, abundance, and critical engagement that position us - and the systems that we create and in which we participate - as powerfully connected with each other. For further insight, please read the Open Letter in response to trauma world from the historical debris of deep soul sickness from two of the elders who initiated the coming together of Inside the Sun.

We are committed to supporting the well-being of all parts of the whole with care and accountability, in order to be change we want to see. Examples of community self-care include:

Working together to share in bringing dreams and callings to life
Responding to crises and challenges with shared determination and vision, expressing and attending to needs (material, psycho-social, and spiritual) as they arise to the best of our ability.
Working together with families and community members navigating incarceration, the prison industrial complex, and the criminal legal system - to strengthen legal and community support, advocacy, and transformation
Incorporating spiritual practices and meditation, values rounds, and personal check-ins when we meet to discuss work areas
Practicing honesty and direct, compassionate communication, and attending to problems with strong foundations of love, values, and resources that we are cultivating along the way
Learning and sharing skills, resources, traditions, and frameworks that serve to transform and liberate
Practicing cooperation rather than re-producing competition