Wellness as Practice: Reimagining Community Care
This article draws on learnings from a recent Community of Practice conversation on the theme of Wellness as Practice. The dialogue featured nINA Affiliates Armando Hernandez and Charisse Daniels-Johnson, along with Jessica Perez, Engagement Coordinator at nINA partner Chrysalis Inc. Together, they explored what it means to move beyond surface-level notions of self-care and into practices that sustain individuals and communities engaged in social justice.
In social justice organizations, wellness often gets framed as an afterthought - something to “get to” once the urgent work is finished. But what if wellness is not a reward for surviving the week, but a practice that sustains us every day?
For those who dedicate their lives to teaching, healing, organizing, and supporting others, wellness cannot simply mean bubble baths and weekends off. It is about cultivating practices that strengthen resilience, restore dignity, and keep people whole in the face of exhaustion and systemic pressures.
One of the panelists reminded us that wellness is deeply relational: “Wellness, for me, is not just about myself but also about what it means to connect to a community.” That shift, from private activity to shared orientation, is what makes wellness sustainable.
Beyond Self-Care
Too often, conversations about wellness are reduced to individual self-care strategies: sleep more, exercise, eat well. While these are important, they can miss the deeper truth that wellness is relational and collective. True restoration requires communities that can carry each other, workplaces that allow for boundaries, and professional cultures that resist burnout as a badge of honor.
Armando Hernandez offered three simple but profound questions that can anchor this shift: “When was the last time you listened with a truly open mind? When was the last time you deeply listened to your body? And when was the last time you honored what you truly need in this moment?”
Making Wellness a Practice
Wellness as practice requires intentionality. That might look like:
Starting meetings with grounding or reflection.
Structuring workloads around human capacity, not just deadlines.
Building rhythms of rest and recovery into organizational life.
Treating joy, laughter, and connection as essential tools of the trade.
Neglecting our own wellness results in compassion fatigue, high turnover, and even physical illness. But when wellness is cultivated as a practice, it fuels longevity, creativity, and the capacity to show up fully for others.
Choosing Sustainability
Wellness as practice is not indulgence. It is strategy. It is survival. It is a declaration that we cannot pour from an empty cup — and that we deserve more than survival.
The call, then, is clear: if we are to sustain movements, classrooms, clinics, and communities, we must build collective wellness into the very architecture of our lives and organizations.
Interested in more conversations like this? Join our Community of Practice, where every month we explore themes that sustain justice-driven work and collective care.