The Activist Well-being Cookbook

Defenders Wellbeing Collective

About the Cookbook:

Created by activist-healers supporting social justice defenders from 14 Global Majority countries, The Activist Wellbeing Cookbook is a collection of radical writings, poems, recipes for care and resistance (and, of course, delicious, diverse cultural food recipes). From one revolution after another, across collective memory, people involved in resistance and struggles for social justice and human rights have been caring for each other in so many beautiful ways. Many of these practices may not have been documented or may have been systematically erased by oppressive or authoritarian regimes; yet, some continue to remember and embody them to this day. This cookbook is our way of remembering.

Born from conversations within the Defenders Wellbeing Collective (DWC), the Cookbook weaves not only the voices of DWC’s first cohort members but also their comrades in different movements, with a vision of disrupting privileged and hegemonic knowledge sources on wellbeing and healing by featuring writings from activists at the forefront of liberation struggles and movements. 

In this cookbook on care from activists around the world, we’ve come to recognize this: that the ways of caring we have now are recipes we’ve learned from those who have come before us, from the legacies and necessities of our social justice movements, all of whom, like us, have nourished, experimented, and transformed practices of care and wellbeing through time. Whether to survive, to reclaim freedom, or create worlds kinder to their bodies, spirits, psyches.

Read activists’ stories encountering care and wellbeing in social struggles, their reflections on care as collective resistance, their recipes of collective care and resilience, and how to make food for the soul. The Cookbook covers diverse themes and topics ranging from Indigenous rights, racism, diasporas, resilience, self-care, ecofeminism, resistance, and so much more. Learn how to create culturally vast recipes from Brazilian Farofa to Malaysian Nasi Lemak Goreng (Fried Nasi Lemak).