Welcome to Early Career Forum Month! This is the second post in a special blog series sharing insights from PRAN’s early career forum members. The forum is designed to support and connect emerging scholars, professionals, and practitioners working in the areas of poverty, inequality, and social justice.
Over the past few years, I have spent much of my time bringing together researchers, policy practitioners and community organisations, creating spaces for people to exchange knowledge and work out how we might collectively respond to the problems we are trying to change. Through this work, I have become increasingly interested in something that is easy to overlook because it rarely appears in a workplan or a set of formal outputs: the care that makes collective work possible.
It is in the introductions between people, the conversations that continue after a meeting has ended, the checking in with someone who is struggling, the work of making a space feel welcoming, or noticing who has not been able to contribute. It is in building trust, holding relationships through disagreement and creating the conditions for people to keep showing up. The more I have noticed this in my own work, and in the work of people around me, the more I have started to think of care not only as something that happens within an economy, but as infrastructure for social change.
This builds on a central insight of feminist economics: the economy does not function without care. Every worker, student, voter and policymaker depends, at some point, on someone else providing it. Whether raising children, supporting ageing parents, looking after neighbours, volunteering in communities or working in childcare, education and social care, these activities make the rest of the economy possible. Yet they remain persistently undervalued, underpaid or entirely invisible.
When governments cut public spending, care needs do not disappear. They are redistributed. Families absorb them, and within those families it is still disproportionately women, particularly racially minoritised women, migrant women, disabled women and those on low incomes, who stretch themselves further to fill the gaps. Poverty, in this sense, is not simply a shortage of money. It is also a shortage of time, energy and the infrastructure of support that enables people to live well.
For decades, feminist economists have argued that care is economic infrastructure. Increasingly, I think we also need to recognise that it is social infrastructure.This is something I have become increasingly aware of through my own work. Over the past few years, I have worked across academic research, policy organisations, community groups and campaigning spaces. I have seen how much of what makes these spaces work happens outside formal roles and job descriptions. It is the person who checks in on a colleague who is struggling, the person who makes sure a new member feels welcome, the person who mentors someone earlier in their career, or who takes the time to repair a difficult relationship. It is the emotional work of creating trust, holding space, bringing people together and reminding one another why the work matters.
These things can easily appear peripheral to the work. They are not. They are part of what allows the work to happen at all. The more time I spend working alongside researchers, community organisations and campaigners, the more convinced I become that there is another invisible economy operating beneath our movements. Alongside the economy of money sits what I think of as an emotional economy: the circulation of trust, generosity, encouragement and collective resilience that makes social change possible.
We often talk about financial resources, but much less about emotional ones. Who has the capacity to keep organising after years of setbacks? Who mentors younger activists? Who notices when a colleague is approaching burnout? Who creates spaces where people can reconnect with their purpose after spending their days confronting injustice? And who is expected to do these things?
Like unpaid care, this emotional labour is rarely measured. It is difficult to quantify and often taken for granted. Yet without it, organisations fragment, movements become exhausted and our collective capacity to imagine alternatives begins to diminish.
This feels particularly important at a time when many people working for social justice are stretched to their limits. Community organisations are navigating funding uncertainty while responding to growing need. Researchers are documenting widening inequalities. Campaigners are witnessing repeated political disappointments. Many of us entered this work because we care deeply about creating a fairer society, yet care itself can become depleted when it is continually extracted without being replenished.
The answer is not for individuals to practise more self-care. Burnout is not a personal problem requiring personal solutions. It is often the predictable outcome of working within systems that demand continual emotional investment while offering little space for rest, reflection or restoration. This is where community becomes infrastructure.
The most valuable knowledge about poverty I have encountered through my work has come not from datasets or policy reports, but from the relationships built within local organisations, mutual aid groups and community spaces. These are places where people share resources, support one another and develop collective responses to challenges that no individual could solve alone. They remind us that tackling poverty is not only about redistributing income, but also about rebuilding the social fabric that enables people and communities to flourish.
If care is infrastructure, then we need to treat it as such. That means investing in childcare, social care and public services. It means recognising the expertise of community organisations and ensuring they have the resources they need to thrive. But it also means creating cultures, within our institutions and our movements, where connection, reflection and rest are understood not as distractions from political work, but as part of its foundation.
This is why communities like PRAN are so vital, not simply as spaces for sharing research or expanding professional networks, but as part of the infrastructure that sustains this work, creating the relationships, encouragement and sense of collective purpose that allow us to keep going.
The challenges we face are complex and deeply entrenched. Transforming them will require rigorous research, bold policy and sustained political action. But it will also require something less often discussed: our collective capacity to stay connected to one another and to the futures we are trying to build.
Perhaps that is the real lesson care has taught me. We often think of infrastructure as roads, railways and power lines: the visible systems that hold society together. Yet there is another kind of infrastructure, quieter but no less essential. It is built through relationships, mutual support and the everyday practice of showing up for one another.
If we want to build a more just economy, we cannot afford to overlook the emotional economy that makes that work possible. Care is not simply something we should demand from our institutions. It is something we must practise in the way we organise, collaborate and imagine change together.
