Social justice and human rights advocates often face stress and trauma, but frequently lack tools to support resilience at the individual, organizational, and movement levels. These stressors can be amplified among the leaders of grassroots, community, and survivor-led human rights groups. Often, such leaders are grappling with significant trauma themselves while trying to advocate for their own rights, as well as the rights of their communities. Despite these challenges, many community-based organizations are also at the forefront of advancing and innovating well-being practices within their movements, and across the human rights field.

The Wellbeing Defenders Collective serves as an environment for reflection, innovation, and honest exchanges, in which human rights leaders can have the flexibility to learn, make mistakes, iterate, and deepen their inner well-being and organizational practices in dialogue with each other.

DWC Podcast

This podcast aims to document the Defenders Wellbeing Collective’s (DWC) journey and the conversations that happened during the design process and the group’s meetings. It’s a participatory artistic documentation of the process through the voices of members of DWC and the team behind the work. Through this podcast, we intend to provide activists with a space to reflect on their journey with DWC and its intersection with their lived experiences. We also offer listeners from all walks of life tools for well-being and resilience.

We hope the podcast will:

1. Document some of the conversations the first cohort had;
2. Amplify the Voices of DWC member;
3. Build a resource of care practices;
4. Foster cross-community connections and solidarity.

The series is hosted by one of DWC members; Nandar, a feminist activist, storyteller and podcaster from Myanmar. Through the different episodes, Nanda explores diverse themes, from creating supportive Global spaces to reimagining activists’ self-care outside Western concepts and addressing financial and linguistic challenges.

PARTICIPANTS