10 Great Resources on Activist Wellbeing
Are you an activist experiencing stress or burnout? These articles, videos and tips will help you stay healthy and well while working to change the world.
Tag
Stress and burnout
Coping with climate change distress
This booklet, drawing on evidence based insights from psychology, offers strategies to cope with the stress of climate change. Includes behavioural, relational, cognitive and emotional coping strategies.
Mutual Aid Disaster Relief Workshop Facilitation Guide
Has your community experienced a disaster? Do you need to have difficult conversations and build individual and community resilience? This guide has all you need to hold a workshop.
Navigating Trauma in Disaster Relief
This guide is for anyone who is experiencing trauma and/or helping people with their trauma. It is by the Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, a grassroots disaster relief network in the US based on the principles of solidarity, mutual aid, and autonomous direct action.
Holding our groups together in hard times
When social change campaigns experience setbacks it’s understandable this can lead to difficulties in activist groups. Here are some tips and further resources for holding groups together in hard times.
How to build a resilient culture of resistance in hard times
US activist and educator Daniel Hunter shares important tips for sustaining ourselves and our movements in the face of challenging times. He outlines seven behaviors that we could incorporate into our groups so we can keep taking powerful and strategic actions.
Sustaining ourselves as activists
Activist wisdom has been gathered from a survey of nearly 200 about how to sustain ourselves as activists. A great list from those who have been there.
How to stay sane in an ‘always-on’ digital campaigning environment
Social media never stops! Jessie Mawson presented these tips for staying sane to the eCampaigning Forum in 2016.
Nonviolent Community Safety and Peacebuilding Handbook
This handbook is a handy and unique resource for activists and community workers engaged in work for peace at a community level throughout Australia. It includes practical ways to intervene in violence, to transform conflict and to build peace.
Balance or Burnout?
A useful model for understanding activist burnout and how to avoid it from the Transitions Towns movement. Includes a downloadable worksheet with prompts for reflection.
Book Review of In the Tiger’s Mouth Empowerment Guide
A review of Katrina Shield’s ‘In The Tiger’s Mouth: An Empowerment Guide for Social Action’. What most distinguishes this books is its emphasis on three elements not often considered in other campaigning texts: self-awareness, collaboration, and self-care.
Group Strategies to Prevent Stress and Burnout
A group’s culture can have a big impact on the likelihood of stress and burnout for members and staff. It’s possible to create a group culture that supports self-care, balance and sustainable work loads and patterns.
Stress Management and Burnout Prevention
High stress levels and burnout are very common among grassroots activists and community workers. Stress management and physical, emotional and spiritual renewal is crucial to looking after ourselves for the long haul.
Hey Activists, R U OK?
The annual R U OK Day aims to prevent suicide by building connection. This articles looks at what individuals and groups engaged in social change can do to connect with and look out for others.
Coming down from stress
To be fresh and ready for the challenges of social change we also need quality time off. Here are some tips for getting the most out of a break, whether a longer holiday, weekends or any captured moment for potential relaxation.
Hope and Activist Burnout
Experiencing defeats contributes to many people losing hope, burning out, or just dropping out of activism. If we can set up our organisations and social movements to function effectively we’re more likely to foster hope and keep engaged and emotionally strong activists.
Ideas for Embodied Activism
Overwhelming events happen and depending on our degree of privilege, daily stressors can be constant. Unless we are in crisis and/or an immediate life threatening situation it’s incredibly beneficial to spend time cultivating resources which support your health, embodiment, connectedness and feelings goodness.
Book Review of The Happy, Healthy Nonprofit: Strategies for Impact without burnout
Nonprofit organisations can be prone to encouraging overwork, simply because they know their employees are emotionally invested. Alexandra Lamb analyses Beth Kanter and Aliza Sherman’s argument that nonprofits should transform their workplace culture to have more productive and happier workers.
Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit: Book Review
Hope in the Dark was written by Rebecca Solnit to help activists and campaigners find hope in times of struggle. Here Matt Ross reviews the American author’s arguments for keeping the faith in times of despair.
Our Hearts in Transition: Book Review
A book review of The Transition Handbook by Rob Hopkins with emphasis on its insights around the emotional & psychological impact of climate change.