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Mindful CSUSM

Develop Awareness Campaign

Here is a toolkit to get you started on your awareness campaign. You can use the information provided below to create flyers, videos, social media posts, songs, poems to get the word out and create awareness. Be creative!! 

Compassion and the Care Economy Defined

Compassion:

An emotional response requiring awareness, intentionality, and courage that has 3 aspects:

  1. Cognitive Aspect: I understand your suffering
  2. Affective Aspect: I feel your suffering
  3. Motivational Aspect: I want to alleviate your suffering

Care Economy:

Care work is required at those times in our lives when we have limited ability to take care of ourselves and have to depend on other human beings for care, particularly as young children, when we experience an injury/illness, become disabled/incapacitated, and as we age.

The Care Diamond

    • Unpaid care provided by families and households: all unpaid work, it comes from love
    • Paid care provided by the market: senior living homes, where others are paid to care for us.
    • Paid care provided by the state: childcare centers, where others are paid to do the caring.
    • Paid and paid care provided by not-for-profit/community sector: churches and community centers (YMCA)

Care Work is Gendered and Creates More Inequalities

According to the ILO (2018) women perform 76.2% of all unpaid care work. Globally 16.4 billion hours are spent on unpaid care work every day which is the equivalent of 2 billion people working without pay for 8 hours per day. If they were remunerated at the global minimum wage it would account for 9% of global GDP.  To be able to provide care in the home at the specific times of the day that it is needed requires job flexibility, part time hours, and jobs with lower promotion possibilities which happen to be in sectors that pay far less than other jobs. This is one of the explanations for the gender wage gap. Unequal participation in unpaid care work results in unequal outcomes in the labor market.

The Looming Crisis in the Care Economy

There was already a steady increase in the shortage of well-trained care workers prior to COVID and it’s only continuing to get worse, coupled with a predicted dramatic increase on the demand for care services over the next three decades as the population over the age of 60 rises to two billion.

Move to Action

Education:

  1. Individually educate yourself or change your behavior in some way
  2. Educate others, create an awareness campaign, or plan an action together
  3. Build coalitions with other groups/organizations towards common goals
  4. Learn from lived experiences & be motivated by compassion to do something about it

Encouragement:

  1. Collaborate with/encourage men to take greater responsibility for care work in the home
  2. Provide paid leave & flexible hours for domestic workers in the workplace/home

In the meantime if you have ideas or questions please contact Dr. Ranjeeta Basu at rbasu@csusm.edu