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 recognize when staying true to your values means stepping back? Over the past two years, the Care Work podcast has explored the challenges, necessity, and beauty of caregiving. Often, the conversation turns to the need for caregivers to take care of themselves in this difficult work—something that can be hard to prioritize for individuals so tuned to caring for others.
How can creators innovate to instill more humanness into their designs? Despite being at the root of almost everything we interact with day-to-day, designers can forget to consider the humans for whom they design.
How connected are you to the food you purchase and consume? Over the past century, society’s focus on the food it consumes has shifted from origins and process to the latest price increase. Many communities also face uncertainty about the availability and quality of fresh foods in their nearest store.
How does a culture of care transform the workplace experience? The call for safe, caring workplaces is becoming increasingly loud, which means building these environments is an essential consideration for founders.
As a manager, how do you balance offering care and corporate responsibility? Many managers may not apply the label of caregiver to their work, but Claire Podulka, the Chief of Staff for TXI, a Chicago-based digital consultancy firm, points out that it is the manager “who can operate at the nexus of care and strategy and efficacy” who really brings out the best in their team—and therefore their company—in those inevitable times of change and ambiguity.
In The First-Time Manager: DEI, Alida acknowledges that being a manager is often challenging, thankless, and confusing. There is a constant expectation to strike the perfect balance between power and love. As she writes, “When do we prioritize the needs of an individual employee over that of the whole team? When do we hold firm that what the team needs is more important than what the individual employee wants?”
How do you define love while embracing the worth of each other? In this episode, Alida is joined by Dr. Alexandra Solomon to discuss acceptance and relational self-awareness to reach a balanced approach to intimate love.
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.
