Who is in the business of providing tender love and care? What does it mean to get paid to nurture strangers? And, what kind of support do these people need?
In Care Work, author and diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging practitioner, Alida Miranda-Wolff, seeks answers to all of these questions with care workers of all kinds through discussions of their lived experiences. Learn how to create a culture of care in your communities and have your own care needs met through episodes that balance real-life stories with actionable takeaways.
How do you define and process grief? Over the next three episodes, Care Work is exploring grief—the collection of emotions and experiences we have with any loss. Essential within this work is inspecting how we process and continue to live within this universal experience.
How do we dismantle the disability stigma? This latest arc on the Care Work podcast explores the concept of disability justice from the perspectives of three people—Tim Villegas, María Emilia Lasso de la Vega, and Lauren Schrero Levy—who are working to change our social approach to accessibility and inclusivity.
From elementary school classrooms to adult care homes, so many of our care structures for disabled people are designed without their participation, often in direct opposition to their stated desires. But why?
When we pose the question of why people with disabilities are so often excluded from general society, the best answer is often “that’s just how it’s always been.” However, research and the lived experiences of these individuals suggest that creating inclusive environments could significantly impact our communities.
Lauren Schrero Levy, a disability rights advocate and lawyer, shares with Alida what she has learned since founding the disability advocacy nonprofit The Nora Project and serving as a civil rights lawyer at Equip for Equality. Together, they explore the challenges in our current institutions for people with disabilities and the promise of inclusive spaces.
How can we design inclusive spaces—physically and virtually—that support neurodiversity?
The Disability Justice movement is increasing the recognition and adoption of inclusive spaces and accessible interaction for people who are neurodivergent and on the autism spectrum. It continues, however, to rely largely on individuals to disclose their diagnoses in spaces where they may initially be uncertain of support.
How can we show everyone the benefits of inclusive educational spaces?
Tim Villegas is the Director of Communications at the Maryland Coalition for Inclusive Education. His work centers around helping school systems build support for more inclusive classroom environments, and he sees firsthand the value of spaces where children with different learning styles learn together. These classrooms benefit not only children with disabilities but also typically developing children and their educators.
In the most recent episode arc, the Care Work podcast explores educational equity with guests who are experts in impactful social education for teens, supportive higher education spaces, and inclusive literacy. In this reflective episode, Alida Miranda-Wolff investigates the parallel themes that emerged throughout these episodes to reveal a multi-faceted definition of educational equity and how its integration could create safer spaces for learners of every age.
When you think of literacy, what comes to mind? Is it reading, writing, or something else? Our definition of literacy is often oversimplified, much like the limits often placed on the question of who is and who is not “literate”. In this episode, Alida discusses literacy equity with Ken Bigger, the Director of Thought Leadership at the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy.
How can educators create unifying classroom spaces where resistance skills can be safely practiced and cultivated?
This is the “freedom dreaming” Johnnie Campbell and Alida Miranda-Wolff do together in this episode of Care Work. As a resistance scholar, educator, and PhD candidate, Johnnie Campbell is putting in the work to build danger-free, liberatory spaces and explore the way Black young adults experience college. He doesn’t strive to merely observe and record them; rather, he plans to use these learnings to tear down damaging higher education structures and policies and rebuild them. In his vision, higher education institutions will go on to center the experiences of young Black people and remove the arbitrary barriers that cause them to be left out.
What supports would have helped ease your transition to adulthood?
Growing up is hard, and young people are repeatedly faced with circumstances they are expected to understand despite their lack of life experience. Then, in these tedious and confusing scenarios, the choices they make follow them throughout their early academic years.
Debra Giunta is the founder of Prismatic, a youth career development program with a soft-skills twist. She is always seeking ways to close the gap between what we expect of our youth and the supports in place to get them there. Her insights into the most effective ways to set students up for success are transforming the lives of kids.
How do we tackle the challenges of caring for underserved youth?
In this episode, Alida Miranda-Wolff asks listeners to remember the benefits of taking small steps to build towards greater outcomes. You might not be able to shut down all the youth detention centers in your state tomorrow, but you can hand a homemade lunch out to a neighborhood child who needs one. Maybe the less overwhelming question is: What can you do today to help one child?
How do we care for people trapped in a broken system and still take care of ourselves? This is the question Alida poses to Jennifer Soble, a former public defender, lawyer, and the founder of the Illinois Prison Project. Jennifer’s organization is striving to update the outdated and oppressive laws that govern the U.S. prison system, helping prisoners serving long-term sentences who deserve freedom.
Why are we so good at finding problems, but so poor at solving them? This is the question Alida Miranda-Wolff puts to Chicago Deputy Mayor of Community Safety Garien Gatewood and the conversation that spans juvenile justice reform and implementation disconnects to real-life examples from the world of cannabis legalization.
