Is Your Audience Feeling Stressed or Overwhelmed? Try Focusing on Community Care
You and your audience are likely experiencing high levels of stress right now.
Last month, the American Psychological Association released their annual Stress in America Survey and more than 7 in 10 adults reported the future of our nation (77%) as a significant source of stress in their lives. Earlier in the year, Gallup also surveyed American stress levels with 49% of participants affirming they frequently experience stress in daily life. With all of this accumulated stress seeping into our daily lives, it’s a good time to schedule programs focused on community care and support.
What is Community Care and why are community care events so impactful?
Mental Health America defines community care as “an approach utilized by individuals to support one another and the broader community.” Community care is stepping in and recognizing a need not being met by the systems in place. This need could be felt by a particular subset of individuals within your community, working parents/caregivers for example. It could also be inequities faced by marginalized groups within your community. The core aspect of community care is recognizing a social well-being inequity and being willing to find community solutions to address this inequity and support the social well-being of everyone.
In the same article, Mental Health America explains why community care is needed to address unmet needs felt in your community: “A foundational aspect of community care is the recognition of inequities that exist for individuals and communities. These inequities are often tied to systemic barriers and structures often referred to as social determinants of health that directly affect the well-being of individuals, including economic factors, access and quality of education and health care, the physical environment, and other complex community structures. As a result, community care responds to existing inequities and gaps in resources by creating new structures to bridge gaps and to increase access to meaningful resources through mutual support and aid provided by individuals and broader community-focused efforts.”
How can I recognize when my community needs extra community care? And how do I start the conversation and gain support for change?
It can sometimes be difficult to ascertain if your community needs to talk about their community care plan. Considering that approximately 50%-70% of adult Americans are currently reporting significant levels of stress, most groups working with adults could benefit from reevaluating their support strategies. Additionally, you can survey your audience with a community needs assessment to see if they are currently facing any daily concerns or if there are certain structures that could be adjusted to provide a more supportive quality of life. When considering a community care event, consider the following elements:
Your audience/community demographics are shifting and this has not been addressed in a healthy way.
Your audience is indicating they are stressed or experiencing burnout regularly.
Your audience recently went through an event that created significant stress or strain (significant change, major weather event, company transition, act of violence).
Your audience is telling you that they feel like they are not getting the support they need.
Many community care conversations can start internally. If you choose to do so, make sure you set communication ground rules and provide multiple formats for folks to provide feedback. Remember, community care addresses the gaps in already existing systems. If your survey or other information-gathering tools indicate that your audience may not know about existing supports, check in with a few folks and see if the issue is not being aware of the existing support or if the existing support does not provide support the way they need. Sometimes hosting a showcase of local supports and resources can be a great way to begin the community care education piece to make sure everyone is aware of their options. Then, you can begin to address concerns of how the existing resources do not meet existing inequities. Even if the community care plan or changes you implement as the result of the feedback cannot address all concerns, make sure you explain your plan of action to everyone in the community and why you chose to develop specific supports. Address the unanswered requests and provide a way to revisit these topics at a later date. However, what if your community is having trouble considering an outside-the-box strategy for community care? Or what if you are hoping to jumpstart a culture change with your audience?
Community Care Events with Expert Speakers Can Be Worthwhile
It is an investment to bring in an outside speaker for your audience, but there are certain moments when it is worthwhile. If you feel your community needs:
Education about the value of prioritizing community care
Outside-the-box community care strategies to consider for your audience
An outside voice to legitimize the process and spark change
A unifying experience to jumpstart the community care conversation
If you resonated with one or more of the bullet points above, then it may be beneficial to consider working with an outside speaker to address community care with your audience.
Our Recommended Community Care Speakers Based on Audience
Here at PLM, we work with a number of incredible community care speakers and authors! Below are a few we would like to highlight based on audience type, but we are always happy to look for a specific speaker that would be the best match for your audience.
Omkari L. Williams speaking at the 2024 Eagles Care Summit to an audience non-profit changemakers.
Public Audience
When working with a public audience or a large segment of a community, it is important to engage a speaker who can inspire collective change. One such speaker we work with is Omkari L. Williams. She helps everyone recognize their capacity to commit to sustainable change through micro-activism. However, she also addresses the topics of self-care and how it can intersect with community care. Omkari is also excellent at inspiring change and encouraging the discouraged. For example, her latest talk is called BECOMING PEACEMAKERS:
In this time of such deep fractures, not only here in the U.S. but worldwide, it is critical that we all develop the skills of becoming peacemakers in our communities and, by extension, the larger world. Recovering, or developing, the ability to navigate and resolve the issues that create such division in our societies is necessary if we're to meaningfully address the challenges that we confront, from the climate crisis to racism and the damage of colonialism. As an example, our educational institutions used to be places where we navigated these differences, yet now we see violence and division tearing these places apart. Finding our way to becoming peacemakers does not mean letting go of our deeply held beliefs; it means opening up dialogues and identifying actions that allow us to acknowledge our shared humanity.This talk will provide a roadmap to guide us toward creating healthy, functioning communities and away from the precipice of division where we now find ourselves.
Dr. Myisha Cherry is also an incredible community care speaker. She regularly addresses the topic of How to Take Care of Each Other in Times of Struggle, but she also recently started addressing the power of love in a new talk called TAKING LOVE PUBLIC:
The idea that love has a place in public life has been criticized for being impractical, impossible, and dangerous. In this talk, I argue that these criticisms are mistaken due to our limited conception of love, where we often reduce love to how we feel. By offering an action-oriented account of love and using the life of writer and activist James Baldwin as an example, I demonstrate how we can take love public in practical and productive ways rather than abstract and destructive ones. The actions I suggest are often seen as irrelevant or antithetical to love, but I'll show how they are examples of love nonetheless. Ultimately, I hope to convince audiences that because love is 'politically possible,' we have a responsibility to get to the task of making the world better via love.
Schools
Addressing community care at a school can be complicated! You have three separate audiences to consider: students, parents/caregivers, and educators/staff. Many of the speakers we work with have extensive experience addressing all three sub-audiences within school communities.
If you are looking to address trauma or mental health, we recommend working with Lee Hawkins, Kai Harris, or Priya Huq.
If you want to pivot your community culture and spark change, we collaborating with Jamilah Pitts or Tony Keith Jr.
If you want to educate and increase support for parents and caregivers, we recommend working with Britt Hawthorne, Tiffany Jewell, or Jamilah Pitts.
If you hope to support your educators and staff, we recommend working with Jamilah Pitts or Britt Hawthorne.
If you are hoping to inspire cultural change among your students, we recommend Tiffany Jewell, Joel Christian Gill, Priya Huq, Tony Keith Jr., or John Jennings.
Non-Profits
Non-profits provide an incredible amount of unique community support to audiences around the world. As such, the speakers you bring in to address your staff or audience need to be familiar with the challenges you face within the non-profit space.
If you are hoping to help your team recapture professional joy and establish new methods of support, we recommend working with Alisha Fernandez Miranda.
If you want to help your audience or team address burnout and make sustainable changes, we recommend working with Omkari L. Williams.
Corporations
For-profit doesn’t mean soulless or uncaring! In fact, positive and supportive work environments can improve the achievement-striving ability of employees.
If you are a corporation trying to create a new community care framework, particularly one that supports the entire community, we recommend working with Jezz Chung.
If you want to address stress and burnout and make changes to help everyone rediscover professional joy, we recommend working with Alisha Fernandez Miranda.
Universities and Colleges
There are a lot of specific pressures that come from being a part of the greater academic community. When addressing community care topics in these spaces, it is important to work with a speaker who understands these nuances.
If you hope to inspire culture change and establish the importance of community care, we recommend working with Dr. Myisha Cherry.
If you need to address a particular bias or inequity, we recommend working with Dr. Amrita Chakrabarti Myers.
If you need to reevaluate how your campus community interacts with the community at large, we recommend collaborating with Dr. Davarian Baldwin.
Key Takeaways
Making sure everyone in your community feels supported is an essential aspect of healthy community. If you think your community might benefit from increased investment in community care, you might want to start by figuring out the gaps in your current supports by distributing a community needs assessment. You can also always reach out to us! We’re happy to help you brainstorm an event to kickstart these conversations.