BACKGROUND

“Caring for one another and caring for the planet could be the economy’s fastest growing sectors”  This line from 2015’s Leap Manifesto has defined and connected so much of our work at The Leap. More than anything else, we have advocated shifting the fundamental basis of our economy and society away from an ethos of extraction, dominance, and endless growth to one of care and repair for each other and the planet that sustains us. Among the pandemic’s lasting lessons has been a new visibility for care work, and a new understanding of it as essential to a functioning society.

Since 2015, one of our main goals has been to broaden the idea of “green jobs”  to include the low-carbon labour that sustains and strengthens our communities: teaching, childcare, nursing, eldercare, farmwork, frontline food provision, and more.  And because so much of this work is done by women and migrants, advancing status, protections and fair pay for these workers has been key to our efforts.

We’ve explored the connections between care and climate work through a short documentary, a major event hosted with Naomi Klein and Rutgers University, in articles and campaign work.  And we were thrilled when our allies The Care Collective published a beautiful Manifesto, creating a theoretical scaffolding for an economy and a society rooted in the value of care work.