I’ve been reflecting a lot on the mode of “care” – not just in the charity sector, but in the community at large. The social fabric that connects us as human beings.

You see, humans became the dominant species not because of our capacity to think, but because of our social ability. That’s why millions of people can create a functioning society. Why we can trade internationally. Why can millions all watch the same video? Why can we build civilisations? One person cannot do it all alone.

Yet Western civilisation has a profound need to idealise “the best”. This is grounded in the idolatry of a single individual as the solution to the world’s problems. This pervasiveness is rife within movements – particularly the charity sector and the fight for civil rights in the US.

My point is this: that focus is a result of individualism. Individualism is tied to capitalism – where personal goals, achievements, and the accumulation of private capital are held in higher regard than the social welfare of the collective. That is the hallmark of Western civilisation, tainting everything we experience or work through.

That is why funding structures and the charity sector’s labour are still graced by this presence, no matter what kind of community we claim to build. We’re still propelled to attach our movements to celebrity ambassadors – people who do not lay their bodies on the line like Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks. (Perhaps the most grounded exception is Muhammad Ali, whose soul rippled across generations.)

This is why our organisations remain hierarchical. Why the sector is still rife with systemic “isms” – products of the twins colonialism and capitalism.

In this blog, I want to centre a meditation on care. At GirlDreamer, we want to centre care around the Dream Fund – providing a holistic approach to working with participants, seeing the whole human being. Within that remit, I’d like to philosophically analyse what care truly means in different contexts.

There is an intimacy in the in‑between – between stagnation and change. As a sector, we are confronted with the reality that we have become agents of the state. The veil has dropped in recent years, waking up most of society – or at least working people – to a scam.

Under the weight of it all, the scam reveals itself: we’ve been taught to admire the lone genius, the celebrity saviour, the exceptional Black woman who made it – while the rest of us are told our ordinary care, our daily labour of holding each other up, isn’t enough. But it is. It always has been.

I didn’t learn this from a textbook. I learned it from living.

Growing up across the world – particularly in the Global South, or as a visitor to communities who still live within indigenous frameworks – I’ve taken it upon myself to understand the history that has been forgotten. I’ve become acutely aware of the propaganda and brainwashing embedded in Western politics, culture, media, and education.

Take the existence of binaries: “right or left” in politics. This separates us. The classic rule of power is divide and conquer. These binaries persist across imagined realities: race (“black or white”), gender (“man or woman”), class (“rich or poor”), sexuality (“heterosexual or gay”).

This creates a dichotomy by which we are constantly searching for labels that divide us – rather than witnessing the flaws on both sides of the binary that keep us separate.

As far as the laws of mathematics are concerned, most human behaviour fits under a bell curve – a normal distribution. The truth is this: statistically, we all fit under a unifying body of similarity far more than our differences suggest. Forgetting this unanimity, we grasp at constant whims to find our identity – when it is constantly changing and flexible. Disagreements cause rifts that keep us all compliant within a system built to be manipulated by a powerful elite that extracts from us constantly.

The same pattern persists in the charity sector. All well-intentioned people fighting for the liberation of politically marginalised groups, separated by missions or political ideology. Yet unanimously, we agree on the system’s barbarism – but true accountability evades us. Funding is never equally shared; it’s a trickle, just enough to absolve the realities that “beneficiaries” face. Imperialistic insurance continues as we spin in our hamster wheels, trying to comprehend why we scroll through emails doing our day‑to‑day while bombs rain down on innocent people elsewhere. It’s absurd that we have to integrate into “normalcy”. So like Groundhog Day, we become focused on band‑aid solutions that don’t heal the blade of repetitive cutting. It’s hard to let out the rage and anger that lives inside us, dormant.

So we continue to go to therapy. Therapy is useful – it helps undo what the system has done to us. But the therapeutic industrial complex still operates on extraction. In the UK, we have the NHS – yet mental health rates are so high that even public services can’t accommodate the complex needs out there, especially given the interplay between race, class, gender, and sexuality. So most are forced to go private, adding to ever‑growing bills. Beyond rising oil prices, food, childcare, mounting rent or mortgage, therapy becomes another way to sink us further into the debt we have to pay for working hard.

I had a conversation with my father when I was away in Malawi. He was born before Jamaican independence in the early 1950s. All he had to learn from were trees, books, the rivers, and the bumbling marketplace of Maggotty in the valleys of St Elizabeth. He, like most of that generation, isn’t a big believer in therapy. Mostly because he believes that we outsource our thinking to others instead of recognising that the human mind has the capacity to critically think about its own issues and problems.

Beyond individualism, in lesser‑developed nations there lies a fabric of social capital. Unfortunately, particularly in cities like London or New York, people are so busy with the rat race that they lose precious time with their friends, family, and the world around them. Loneliness is pervasive. The con of capitalism is that you constantly need to pay for social connection or access to nature – by spending exorbitant amounts on holidays and experiences – rather than it being a given. I believe that if we had more intimacy between people and nature in the social fabric of our society, we might not be so heavily reliant on therapy. Perhaps our “bad moods” or the January “blues” come from the fact that many sit alone, stewing in their own problems – problems that could be solved by simple conversation and relationality. It is our avoidance of depth that keeps the charity sector in the clutches of capitalist and colonial patterns. We are too afraid to have these conversations not on a whim, but as a matter of intentional practice.

That is why GirlDreamer’s focus on creating affordable opportunities for retreats and community collaborations, and why in the workplace we opt for genuine conversations that aren’t entirely built around agendas, KPIs, or management – we are actively trying and testing whether there is another way to live and work. We may have more technology and AI, but human beings – at least in the so‑called “progressive” West – are moving backwards, not forwards. The real question is: What if there’s another way to live than this?

My father learned from trees, rivers, and a marketplace in Maggotty. I learned from six countries, a UN diplomat’s briefcase, and the slow unravelling of a system that promised care but delivered extraction. Neither of us had the perfect education. But both of us know that care is not a luxury. It’s the only thing that ever held us together. What if we started acting like it?

Emma Bloomfield