Enabling Space for Health & Healing
In the world in which loving care is normal, we avoid sickness where it's avoidable. Because sickness and harms cannot be eradicated, spaces for healing are a necessary precondition for healthfulness. What does a system look like in which healthfulness and healing space are norms? We look at it in two general ways that are deeply interrelated: daily and community care; and professional or expert care.
Daily and community care
We can't deny that some of the technologies and structures of our modern world are responsible for improving health outcomes and lengthening our lives. And we are grateful for them. But today's work norms are also responsible for making us sick before sending us through systems to “fix us” with a few band aids that are meant to get us well enough to go back to work.
Jobs are not only designed to make us personally sick. They have also sickened our planet and communities, poisoned our food and air, and caused planetary harm at a scale that we have never seen before — at a time in which there is more abundance than ever. The need to constantly produce more, faster, is not the answer. What we expect from workers and value in our organizational communities needs to evolve.
Professional or expert care
In the most practical sense, supporting health and healing requires affordable access to health care professionals. As a new organization made up of entrepreneurs who identify as women, BIPOC, working mothers, individuals with disabilities, and/or individuals without generations of inherited wealth, high-quality health care that meets our needs is hard to come by.
It is also a sun around which our lives revolves. For example, if you or a family member that depends on you has a disability that requires specialized care, you access health care by working a full time job or Medicaid that sets eligibility at poverty levels. The system drives you either to earn less in order to receive benefits or earn more and make yourself sicker.
High quality healthcare is not accessible to entrepreneurs. They must either pay out of pocket through private individual plans — which are less and less available — receive health care through an employer — which prevents them from following their own ideas — or get it through a loved one that works full time. While the law does not necessarily demand that individuals work full time to receive health insurance, there is no incentive for companies to offer insurance to part time workers.
Systems of entrepreneurship are set up to support white, wealthy, young, healthy individuals without family members that depend on them for care. Because all people understand themselves and their own needs best, the products, services, systems, and infrastructures such entrepreneurs make will inevitably reflect their needs best. The wealth gap grows alongside the health and power gap.
Reflecting on solutions
Supporting health and healthfulness is a value that relies a great deal on organizational wealth. We will struggle to meet it in the ways we hope until our financial context changes. But financial context alone does not solve the problem. Ultimately, the bigger systems need to change.
As a team that loves to imagine radical solutions, we're asking questions to be a source of solutions one day:
Among the catalytic and philanthropic supporters of entrepreneurs today, who is developing strategies to support new models of health benefits that sit alongside grants, catalytic capital, and/or incubation?
Among the fiscal sponsors and unions for freelancers and independent workers, what are the challenges of offering benefits? Where or how could scaling and solidarity support alternatives?
Why do organizations with good intentions end up overworking their teams and prioritizing productivity at collective expense?
What structural guardrails do we need to prevent the money we accept from pressuring us to sacrifice our values?
