This letter was supposed to be about the desire to mother. Then, the enterprise of writing about hypothetical children was significantly derailed by the reality of caring for two firmly non-hypothetical children. This letter is now a jumbled mess.

In The ‘Problem’ of Maternal Desire (2021)1, psychotherapist Daphne de Marneffe writes:

“There is something unvoiced about the experience of motherhood (...). It sways our choices and haunts our dreams, yet we shy away from examining it with our full attention. Treated both as an il­lusion and as a foregone conclusion, it is at once obvious and invisible: our desire to mother.

The desire to mother is not only the desire to have children, but also the desire to care for them. It is not the duty to mother, or the compulsion to mother, or the concession to mothering when other options are not available. It is not the acquiescence to prescribed roles or the result of brainwashing. It is the long­ing felt by a mother to nurture her children; the wish to participate in their mutual relationship; and the choice, insofar as it is possible, to put her desire into practice.

(...)

Even to pose the question is to invite almost instant misconstrual. It’s as if this would recommend to women to live through others, forsake equality, or relax in the joys of subsidized homemaking. But that reflexive misinterpretation is itself evidence of how difficult it is to think about maternal desire as a positive aspect of self.”2

I sit on the floor next to his playmat. I read pages of Marguerite Duras’ Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein out loud to him. He doesn’t seem to be understanding much, but then again neither am I, so I at least do not feel judged. The book’s rather disagreeable narrator is largely making up the story as he goes, stalking a woman he knows exactly four facts about and hypothesising as to her next moves. His experience is in fact not too unlike that of caring for a baby: following the steps of an unpredictable person with puzzlingly impenetrable intentions, attempting to best plan for any contingencies.

You, my children, do not exist.

You might never exist — I do not know what life, what my body have in store for me. You do not exist, you might never exist and still I long for you. How can I long to meet someone I know nothing about? I know not when or how you will come, whose hands will welcome you among us. Kind, gentle hands, I hope. I selfishly wish for at least one of you to have eyes blue like mine, but that is not something I can control. Very little about you is within my control, and that makes the prospect of meeting you all the more vibrant.

How do I know whether I will love you?

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You will have nothing but a phenomenal hunger for life. You will be persons so full it will take personhood itself by surprise. You will step through mud and make huts for bats with injured wings. You will be life and beget life, whole words in lost tongues, secret conduits to each other that I will be at a loss to decipher. You will shout at the trees asking to play, you will show us unfound roots and then close back the dug-up hole because nature should not be so wounded. You will bear wonders the likes of which the poets did not care to write about, because they did not know you and did not care to try. My body will shape itself to your mouths and you will smile. Mystics will give in to the enigma of your birth.

We will trim leaves and read dog-eared pages and sometimes try to eat the pages too. We will lead a thick and meaningful existence, move through the city like we own it.
I will fail you. Time and time again.

Or maybe we will do none of those things. You will render all of these words obsolete because nothing I write can prepare me for meeting you, for who you will choose to become. That humility fascinates me. There is a particular burn within me for the day I get to meet you.

A little girl stretches herself out on one of the curved green benches of this Paris park. My nephew stares at the trees above his stroller, though there is not much movement to amuse him. The air is scarce. A leaf falls and nestles itself into the arms of his stuffed bear.

Another child nearby falls from a tiny bicycle. She doesn’t cry. She is looking for an adult presence to signal her pain to. Locks eyes with one. Now she is hurt.

Children spray each other with water guns. A small boy, wide-eyed and barely walking, comes towards me and just stares. I say hello. He does not respond.

“O children, open your hearts to me
And tell me your wonder-thoughts
Who lives in the palace inside your brain?
Who plays in its outer courts?
Who hides in the hours To-morrow holds?
Who sleeps in your Yesterdays?
Who tiptoes along past the curtained folds
Of the shadow that Twilight lays?

O children, open your eyes to me
And tell me your visions too;
Who squeezes the sponge when the salt tears flow
To dim their magical blue?
Who brushes the fringe of their lace-veined lids?
Who trims their innocent light?
Who draws up the blinds when the sun peeps in?
Who fastens them down at night?”

— Edward Elgar, The Starlight Express, Op. 78: To the Children

He writhes in my arms, sticky, confused, as I try to rock him back to sleep. I wipe his forehead with a towel dipped in cold water. I say it is three a.m. and his parents will be back tomorrow and I love him and I know it is too hot and there’s nothing I can do about it. I think about how many of us there must be right now in the world doing this exact thing, many in way worse conditions than I, feeling helpless in the face of this nonsensical weather.

I remember a friend telling me her climate consulting firm made corporate clients go through a simulation where they had to put a crying newborn to bed on the top floor of a poorly insulated social housing building amid a forty-degree heatwave. Some clients complained it was too alarmist. I’d like a word.

I stand still in the dark as his eyes finally begin to close.
I am not interested in the book you wrote about global fractures and the Great Powers™. I want to know if you have held a child. Hold the baby and only then might you get to make the rules.

The crinkle of his sensory toy, akin to the wrapper of a takeout burrito, is making me hungry. I move to the only free bench that remains in the shade, closer to the park’s other attendees. It is Wednesday afternoon. I hear French from the children and Spanish from the women. I hope they have not had to forfeit their own desire to mother in order to care for someone else’s child. Unfortunately, I suspect it may be so.

There are no men.

The necessity for children is the stuff of policy briefs; the desire to mother is not. It occupies an odd place in our understanding. The world has rarely looked approvingly on our sexual desires; it has only recently and reluctantly begun to make space for our ability to choose not to be mothers; and it is certainly ambivalent even to our enthusiastic want of motherhood. Even when we do want it, it cuts and restricts us in ways beyond what is needed, often in vile ways, often without asking for permission.

De Marneffe writes: “We often resist thinking through [the] implications [of maternal desire] because we fear becoming mired in clichés about woman’s nature, which will then be used to restrict women’s rights and freedoms. But if we resist thinking about [it], or treat it as a marginal detail, we lose an opportunity to understand ourselves and the broader situation of women.”

I recently told someone that my current professional and creative path was largely impulsed by an early intellectual fascination with motherhood. She replied, even without having children! It struck me as strange. We do not so wonder why Victor Hugo became impassioned with misery or capital punishment, having never been threatened with either. It is merely human.

In fact, my children, I have met you. I have seen you in the eyes of others I fed, rocked, bathed, soothed. I have glimpsed you amid wrinkled smiles and fresh ones alike. Those I fed, rocked, bathed, soothed, I did so with my heart already full with the thought of you. And if I am not to meet you, or rather if you should come to me through means other than those I have envisioned, I will do my best to care for whichever of you crosses my path. I cannot promise I will not cry; in fact, I most certainly will. But I will try to be strong, as there are many of you out there, many more I could ask to share in this journey with me. I will love your cousins who already make my life so full; I will love the man who would have been your father with a renewed intensity. I will study and learn how to place my hands between you and the ground when you arrive.

I had set out to write to my children. But squeezing past my timid thoughts of an inexistent progeniture came real, fleshy, incessantly moving children in striped shorts and collared dresses, compelling me to look at them instead. So I did.

Rebecca Walker, daughter of Alice, wrote in 1991:

“I owe it to myself, to my little sister on the train, to all of the daughters yet to be born, to push beyond my rage and articulate an agenda. (...) My involvement must reach beyond my own voice in discussion, beyond voting, beyond reading feminist theory. My anger and awareness must translate into tangible action.

I am ready to decide, as my mother decided before me, to devote much of my energy to the history, health, and healing of women. Each of my choices will have to hold to my feminist standard of justice. To be a feminist is to integrate an ideology of equality and female empowerment into the very fiber of my life. It is to search for personal clarity in the midst of systemic destruction, to join in sisterhood with women when often we are divided, to understand power structures with the intention of challenging them.

While this may sound simple, it is exactly the kind of stand that many of my peers are unwilling to take. So I write this as a plea to all women, especially the women of my generation: (...) the fight is far from over. Let this dismissal of a woman’s experience move you to anger. Turn that outrage into political power. Do not vote for them unless they work for us. Do not have sex with them, do not break bread with them, do not nurture them if they don’t prioritize our freedom to control our bodies and our lives.”

For years I have looked to this quote for inspiration and drive. Staying loyal to it, today I also want to add that I am ready to decide, as many have before me, to devote much of my energy to the history, health, and healing of children. To denounce those who seek to use, exclude, mock or dismiss them. To shed light on the harm they incur, both obvious and hidden; to welcome what they have to teach us. To imagine spaces that work for them, write new rules that protect them.

I owe it to myself, to the little girl on the green bench, to all of the sons and daughters yet to be born.

Previous letters:

What is a good society?

Whatever one’s political positioning, any answer to that question must grapple with two central matters: protection, and punishment. Who does a good society protect? How? Does it respond to violence with punishment, and if so, by what means? What is the central purpose of punishment: preventing further harm, or addressing a perceived injustice by inflicting proportional harm? And what of the purpose of protection: is it to shield individuals from being on the receiving end of violence, or does it go further, setting out to equip them with what they need to flourish?

Around those questions emerge political and ethical fault lines. Everyone sees themselves, often in good faith, as protecting certain values or groups — but who to protect, what from, and by punishing whom are where camps start to form. It is pretty consensual, for example, that a good society prides itself on protecting its children: but from what? Widespread sexual abuse at home, or being taught about sex at school?

Progressive accounts of the role of the state emphasise its responsibility to nurture, to create the necessary conditions for individuals and communities to thrive — or, at least, to grant those disadvantaged by their circumstances no less of an opportunity to try. Conservative accounts point to the state’s role in preserving the social order, notably through the punishment and/or removal of those perceived to threaten that order. It’s the inevitably gendered “Mommy-Daddy divide”, it’s ‘hugs not bullets’ versus the ‘war on drugs’.

Notions of protection and punishment are uniquely effective rhetorical tools because they immediately trigger our moral heuristics — the cognitive shortcuts we use to make rapid ethical judgments. Protecting the innocent is good, letting the guilty run free is bad. At least until the advent of post-carceral societies, achieving one typically calls for doing the other: protection and punishment are inextricably linked. Different political forces simply make different cases for who to place in different categories: those who need protecting; those who protect; and those who must be punished.

Problems arise when we are confronted with the fact that these categories are deeply permeable.

For example, we might realise that those we’ve always painted as protectors — the ‘good family men’ — are perfectly capable of predation. #MeToo triggered a societal shift of planetary magnitude precisely because it flipped on their heads our traditional categories of respectability and abuse. That shift was then met with immense anger, as is customary any time an “old idea system from which the energy is gone but which has the heaped-up force of custom, tradition, money, and institutions behind it”, as Adrienne Rich brilliantly put it, is questioned.

That old idea system so begrudges any attempts to dislodge it that it has an unfortunate tendency to protect those who commit harm, and punish those who ask for protection. In 2025, the European Court of Human Rights condemned France for “secondary victimisation” during a trial for sexual assault; the defense lawyers had treated the woman who came forward as if she was herself guilty. Last month, the ECHR issued another condemnation, regarding a case where a French court gave a formal warning for libel to a young girl whose rape case against a classmate was dismissed.1 Ask the state to protect you, they say.

Going back to our categories, we might also realise that those who we have declared must be punished turn out to need care. This presents another unwelcome blurring of boundaries, which usually results in our desire to punish being stronger than our responsibility to protect. This was evident with the recent news that UK prisons are still handcuffing and shackling women who give birth while in detention, among other grave human rights violations recorded by the Birth Companions charity.

Finally, perhaps most damningly for the credibility of our institutions, we might realise that among those we punish is an over-representation of individuals we failed to protect. Incarcerated women are extremely likely to have been victims of domestic violence, and by extremely I mean basically guaranteed.2 Children who went through foster care are much more likely than their peers to end up in prison. And though clear research is still scarce, roughly a third of incest victims (which as a reminder concerns at least one in ten people worldwide) were abused not by an adult but by a fellow child, themselves often victims of incest by an older relative. Cycles of abuse and victimhood intertwine in ways our neat categories cannot possibly capture.

Now, the state is not exclusively responsible for the violence that takes place in people’s homes: but it is responsible enough to put into question its monopoly on punishment. Indeed, how legitimate are our justice systems if they primarily function to palliate our failures of care?

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The ethics of care offer a transformative new way to approach these failings. As an ethics of the particular, they force us to understand the complex and specific circumstances that surround human behaviour, rather than applying blanket logics.

Thinking about protection and punishment through the lens of care yields at least three very important shifts:

One, needing protection — and vulnerability more broadly, though not all vulnerability calls for protection — is neither a moral failure nor an injunction to passivity. Our societies treat deviations from the norm of being male, white, able-bodied, autonomous and economically productive almost like offences: ‘it’s a bit annoying that you’re having children, not great for company finances’; ‘it’s a shame you’re being abused, sure you aren’t a little responsible?’; ‘it’s too bad you’re homeless, but could you not sleep on that nice bench?’. By showing vulnerability and interdependence to be universal features of the human condition rather than anomalies, care ethics seek to address the enduring stripping of agency that still comes with receiving care. The title of a recent piece by anti-ableism journalist says it all: “Will you please treat me like a person?”.

Two, relatedly, being in a position to protect others is not an invitation to dominate. It is, rather, a responsibility to put one’s abilities at the service of others’ needs, building with and for them. As philosopher put it, “asymmetry doesn’t automatically create hierarchy”. The spaces most meant to welcome vulnerability — schools, hospitals, nursing homes, maternity wards — will not stop being spaces where harm is perpetrated against those who seek care until they shed this paternalistic attitude. All the empowerment in the world cannot make a labouring woman’s dignity be respected, be she imprisoned or not, if the people in charge of assisting her are not inherently convinced of her equal humanity3.

Three, having caused harm does not strip one of their right to basic protections. In progressive spaces, rejoicing at countries who introduce the death penalty for pedocriminals or joking about animal testing on rapists because “what are they going to say, no?” is counter-productive. It is merely indulging a deep-seated and understandable desire for vengeance, but it is not practically helping to protect anyone. It also once again flattens reality into ill-fitting boxes, omitting the fact that people have complex relationships even with those who abused them — something that an ethic of the particular does help to take into account.

These shifts all boil down to one overarching horizon: moving from a logic of control to a logic of care. The latter logic doesn’t entirely eschew the possibility of punishment, which can still be necessary. But it treats punishment as a mere means to the central end of protection, rather than a goal in itself; and as only a legitimate one if the avenues of prevention and care have been meaningfully invested in.

That might sound naïve to our ears trained on centuries of punitivism. But it is, in fact, the more rational way to do things. In an interview with Le Monde about former French prime minister Gabriel Attal’s proposal to harshen the sentencing of youth delinquency, historian of childhood and youth Véronique Blanchard said:

“We are witnessing a form of irrationality, decorrelated from all statistical and sociological reality. Like magical thinking. But what we don’t hear as much is that the history of repression and punishment when it comes to youth delinquency is much longer than the choice of education and protection (...), and it has never worked. Our society could make another choice, that of support, education and time. As a former educator, I know how much that allows children to find their place in society and to accept its rules.”

We can choose the logic of care. Millions of people already do, in their thinking, their practice, their activism. We can choose a future that does not throw around vague calls for more “security” for political clout without actually committing the resources that keep people truly safe.

This choice is not a simple one: care is the opposite of the easy way out. It crumbles under any attempt to make broad, sweeping statements; it is not readily grasped through number-crunching. And as Rich said, the logic of control has the weight of centuries propping it up. But it is a choice we can make, and one that has the potential to radically transform how we exist with one another.

Dear all,

Apologies for skipping last month’s letter. These have been intense weeks for a variety of reasons, including a peculiarly human mix of grief and joy, a lot of auntie-ing, and an overdue restructuring of my professional life. But then our April decided to masquerade as July, and Paris now stretches its legs out on the terraces, apricot juice in hand. All is well.

In practice, this restructuring means the care think tank I’ve been working towards — now Cara, soon-to-be a registered nonprofit — will focus on advancing the care society specifically in France, through previously mentioned research and ground action projects. This newsletter, The Fifth Wave, will remain what it has been: a space to imagine a future where care sits at the heart of our lives and our cities, and to explore the transformations needed for caregiving to get the support and recognition it deserves.

I spent a while making sense of the above thoughts, as I considered how the control-heavy ways in which our societies approach protection and punishment limit our ability to develop true logics of care. I hope they resonate — your reflections are always welcome, don’t hesitate to share them.

Finally, on the topic of exiting logics of control in relationships of care, I highly recommend ’s posts about authoritative parenting (and all of her writing, really, it is always deeply thought-through and leaves one looking at the world in a refreshed way.)

Thank you as always for being here,

— MM

That violence is learned is one of the central contributions of the social sciences to our understanding of human behaviour.

We know, by now, that aggressive and dominating attitudes are progressively acquired through a number of social models, rather than primarily the product of an innate drive.1 We know there is a mutually reinforcing relationship between cultural, structural and interpersonal violence2, that becoming numb to one type of violence makes one more likely to engage in others – the way a slaughterhouse opening in a town drives up the local prevalence of domestic abuse.3

In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici recounts how French Jesuit missionaries sought out to dictate to the Montagnais-Naskapi, an Indigenous nation of mid-17th century Canada, how to govern themselves:

“[The French] were scandalised by their ‘lack of morals’; they saw that the Nasapki had no conception (...) of authority, of male superiority, and they even refused to punish their children.” (...) A missionary recalled in his diary an exchange he had with a Nasapki man: “I told him it was not honourable for a woman to love anyone else except her husband, and that this evil being among them, he himself was not sure that his son, who was present, was his son. He replied, ‘Thou has no sense. You French people love only your children; but we love all the children of our tribe.’ I began to laugh seeing that he philosophised in horse and mule fashion.”4

The Jesuits eventually succeeded in persuading the Nasapki to whip their children by conditioning their fur trade agreements to such practices. We know, in other words, that violence is taught and continuously enforced, and not the spontaneous manifestation of our state of nature.

By contrast, we know a lot less about how care is learned. We infer it, to an extent, as the mirror image of the apprenticeship of violence – but the symmetry only goes so far. Only relatively recently have we begun to research care as a practice, with principles, which can be done well or badly, and therefore taught. Western philosophical traditions inquired at length into the nature of the self and our moral obligations to one another; yet their proponents rarely connected these questions to the everyday reality of those who cared for them, and how well – unsurprisingly, mostly how badly – they cared back. Domestic work and dependency care were of the realm of the mundane, the practical, unfit for philosophical reflection. They just… happened.

Even the idea that caregiving can be learned at all is a relatively new one. Attention to others, the capacity to nurture, reassure, comfort, were long considered innate qualities that come with being born female. Yet contradictorily, they were also thought to be fragile forms of knowledge that could be lost if one learned other things. The gradual opening of university examinations to women in 1870s England led to heated debates between proponents of ‘educational assimilation’ and those of ‘educational pluralism’, who preferred to keep boys’ schools and curricula separate from those of girls. Their central claim was that giving girls a “boys’ education”, with subjects such as physics and history, would result in the loss of their ‘natural sensuality’ and in “the creation of a new race of puny, sedentary and unfeminine students”. This would “destroy the grace and charm of social life, [and] disqualify women from their true vocation, the nurture of the coming race and the governance of well-ordered, healthy and happy homes.”5 One doctor even claimed that after a period of higher education, “flat-chested girls” would be “unable to suckle infants.”6

This marginalisation and long-lived misleading beliefs about the nature of care mean that unlike violence, we don’t have good mental models of what ‘structural care’ or ‘cultural care’ look like, or how they trickle down into interpersonal care. As a result, much of the way we structure caregiving in society is not, in fact, done with any deep understanding of how care works. France’s 2015 paternity leave reform, which I wrote about last July, is a good example of this: it failed to provoke any significant uptake among new fathers because it did not factor in that the ability to take care of a child is developed over time, rather than simply turned on and off.

As wisely pointed out, learning to care – in the broadest possible sense, of how we maintain our world and each other, how we build strong webs of interdependence without losing our unique selves – is mostly not an information problem. You do not learn it the way you would the date of a famous battle. You see it modelled all around you. At home, where you learn who does what kind of care, how much it is acknowledged and valued; whether it is an expansive force that spills out to all who pass through or an exclusive rarity, granted with conditions. At school, where you internalise authoritarian cultures that center punishment and hierarchy, or on the contrary, where healthy relationality to others and to nature is intentionally embedded in the curriculum.

None of these sites of learning operate in isolation. Cultural narratives, artistic representation, linguistic changes, our webs of weak and strong ties to the people in our lives – all of those shape our perception of how important care is and who is responsible for it. A child can be taught non-violent communication at their forest school yet see domination modelled at home every day. Teenage boys can be given anti-misogyny classes, but those are unlikely to mean much if they receive constant messaging that paints women as lesser humans.7

This is why care systems are such a central focus of The Fifth Wave’s work: they are the overarching structures that either support or suppress our learning of care. They have the power to keep vulnerability alien, dependency shameful, respect a sign of weakness, and hierarchy natural – but they also have the power to make them something else entirely. They can be built to make interdependence an utterly basic part of our social fabric, such that care flows with much fewer barriers.

They could mean every city center has somewhere people can come to with those they care for, so that a man who cares full-time for his wife with Alzheimer’s can get a few hours of rest and some warm conversation. They could make it possible to take a ‘care day’ off to support a sibling with their new baby; make alloparenting so banal that prenatal classes are almost superfluous; they could make dying at home, surrounded by relatives, a much more normal end to a person’s life. Once we stop accepting the systems we have today as the best we can get, a world of alternatives opens up.

These systems are costly and difficult to build; they require grit and imagination. Rita Thapa, who I interviewed in November, had to push through the skepticism of many a foreign donor and government official to transform Nepal’s primary care system and put mothers at its core. Cambodian Children’s Trust, whose pioneer ‘Village Hive’ model Bethany Hansel analysed last month, will have to mitigate the effects of corruption and antiquated charity structures to make it the country’s default child protection system. And in another analysis, Bethany showed the challenges faced by New Zealand in scaling its national ‘pedagogy of care’ rooted in Māori principles.

Despite these obstacles, such systems exist, and more of them are emerging. The ‘institutional paradox of care’ I wrote about in September, which seems to make rigid policy structures or profit-making companies incompatible with good care provision, can be overcome. My mission over the next few decades will be to help design institutions with care built in – that make care so supported, so obviously central to all of our lives that learning it simply becomes a normal part of being human.

Further reading:

“There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.”

This quote by Octavia Butler has infused my work since the birth of Cara and The Fifth Wave, a little over five months ago. It captures a dual reality behind their creation.

First, the current organisation of care in our societies is a broken one. It’s disproportionately shouldered by certain groups of people. It fails to provide the adequate care all of us need to thrive. It denies that vulnerability and interdependence are essential dimensions of our shared human condition, treating them as odd glitches. It prioritises clinical and short-term economic outcomes over a holistic understanding of well-being. It siloes care into separated segments of our lives, rather than grounding it at the heart of community, work, and family life. It is ill-equipped to deal with the consequences of substantial ongoing demographic changes.

Second, this isn’t a fatality. There are new suns. Better systems exist and are being built across the world. Others are being imagined by researchers, activists, organisers, and can be made a reality. Better ideas about care exist, new ones are continuously emerging, and they can be made to reach many more minds than they currently are.

This dual reality is our ‘why’. The way we structure and understand care is inadequate, and we need to envision bold and interconnected solutions to fix it.

As the first month of this new year comes to a close, and in the spirit of building in public, I wanted to make our ‘how’ a bit more explicit. To clearly lay out the different areas of our work, and give you an idea of what’s to come. As I set out to do so, I was reminded – by the lovely – of another quote, this time by a thoughtful scholar of Butler, :

“We need to move from competitive ideation, trying to push our individual ideas, to collective ideation, collaborative ideation. It isn’t about having the number one best idea, but having ideas that come from, and work for, more people.”1

The association felt fitting. Black feminists have already said much of what we need to change the world. So that’s our ‘how’: grounded in the insights of care ethics and feminist care studies2, we work to a) apply those insights to transform our understanding of care and b) scale them into replicable policy solutions. In other words, we aim to take the products of collective ideation, and use them to build care systems that work for more people.

This work is organised as follows:

Analyses

We analyse local and national alternatives to current care systems, in order to learn from, adapt, and replicate them. These are incredibly useful for three reasons.

One, the necessity of care and the essence of what constitutes good care transcend borders: care systems need to be tailored to their specific cultural, social, political and economic context, but the broad principles that make them successful and the lessons extracted from their challenges can inform systems-building across the world.

Two, when it comes to social innovation, the “local initiative —> replication —> integration into the national infrastructure” pipeline is a tried and tested way to drive society-wide change. We believe in starting small, and scaling what works.

Three, ‘care systems’ is a huge umbrella: it includes spaces like schools, hospitals, birthing homes, domestic violence shelters, families, nursing homes, foster centers, community health centers or even public housing, as well as the institutions, laws, and economic forces that determine how those are organised. We don’t claim we’ll know how to transform them all — and much specialised knowledge already exists. Rather, our value lies in taking a connected look at how care flows within and across these systems, in order to inform better, integrated solutions.

Analyses we’ve published include:

Interviews

We publish interviews with people building the futures of care, whether through their practice or their thinking. People who try their hardest to make up for the harshness of our systems with creativity and passion.

And because the best insights on care come from caring, I ask all my interviewees: “Who do you care for, and who cares for you?”

Essays

We publish writing which helps us understand what our relationship to care is lacking, why it matters, and envisions another way forward. We aim to elevate the importance of caregiving in all its forms, as essential public infrastructure, as a structuring principle of social life, and as a central concern of political decision-making.

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This dual goal of thinking and acting will mean we’ll often have to help build things under this sun while we imagine life under new ones. I don’t see that as a contradiction. The spectrum of social change ranges from a radical reinvention of our existing structures — radical in its primary sense of ‘at the root’, not necessarily most extreme — to incremental progress within existing constraints.

We want to do both, even if that means often having to make do with the trappings of bureaucracy, politics, and human stubbornness. Even if that means helping to build imperfect systems; as long as they’re systems that work for more people.

This is going to be an exciting year. Again, we welcome collective ideation. Don’t hesitate to share your thoughts with us, topics you’d like to see more research on, or innovative systems we could analyse. Moreover, if you know caregivers, midwives, researchers, journalists, organisers, local officials, anyone who cares about care, anyone building the care society who you think would benefit from engaging with our work, don’t hesitate to share it with them too.

Thank you,

With care,

— MM