The Power of Care in Youth-Based Commoning for Climate Justice

Everyday Practices of Care in Commoning

Feminist scholars have long examined care as labor that sustains life and supports others (Federici, 2012; Tronto, 1993). Scholarship on commoning expands this understanding to include the emotional, relational, and affective labor through which people collectively sustain communities and environments (Gibson-Graham & Miller, 2015). Rather than treating commons as simply shared resources, this work emphasizes the everyday practices, such as acts of hospitality, reciprocity, emotional support, and cooperation, through which commons are continually enacted (Bresnihan & Byrne, 2015; Singh, 2013).

This perspective also extends care beyond human relationships to more-than-human worlds. Care for forests, gardens, animals, and land produces affective attachments and relations of responsibility between humans and nature (de la Bellacasa, 2017; Singh, 2017). Home gardens, for instance, become spaces where migrants cultivate belonging and memory through care for soil and plants (Madianou, 2012), while pastoral communities sustain reciprocal relations among land, livestock, and people (Goldman, Davis, and Little, 2016). Care therefore becomes central to sustaining both ecological and social life.

The Political-Economic Dimensions of Care

A second strand of scholarship examines how care sustains collective action and political organizing. Concepts such as care-tizenship and response-abilities describe how people enact citizenship and political responsibility through practices of mutual care and stewardship (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2019). In commoning practices, care becomes political: it sustains activism, builds solidarity, and enables collective responses to injustice (Nieto-Romero et al., 2023; Rigkos-Zitthen, McGregor, and Williams, 2024).

Care is particularly important in activist spaces, where emotional support, trust, and mutual aid help sustain movements through burnout, uncertainty, and delegitimization (Chatterton, Featherstone, and Routledge, 2013). Through caring with others, activists develop responsibilities toward broader communities and become more attentive to structural inequalities and privilege (Tronto, 1993). These relations cultivate what Haraway (2016) and de la Bellacasa (2017) describe as response-abilities: the capacity to recognize and respond to others’ needs through relations of interdependence.

At the same time, feminist political-economy scholars have shown that care work is unevenly distributed and often invisible despite being essential to sustaining social life and collective action (Haraway, 2016). Much of this labor, including emotional support, relationship maintenance, organizing, and caregiving, is disproportionately performed by women, racialized people, immigrants, and other marginalized groups, while remaining undervalued and invisible (Lawson, 2007; Tronto, 1993). Attending to the political economy of care therefore reveals how movements seeking social transformation may nonetheless reproduce unequal distributions of labor internally.

Critical Perspectives on Care in Commoning

Critical scholarship highlights that care and commoning are shaped by power relations and social difference, influenced by gender, race, caste, ethnicity, migration status, age, and disability, which shape how people experience responsibility, participation, and belonging (Clement et al., 2019; Nightingale, 2019; Tummers and McGregor, 2019). Care labor itself is unevenly distributed, and some groups disproportionately bear the burdens of sustaining collective life while remaining excluded from recognition and decision-making (Parris & Williams, 2019).

For example, Blau (2021) shows how patriarchal and age-based hierarchies devalue women’s and young people’s care work within commons governance. Thus, care can simultaneously foster solidarity while reproducing exclusions and inequalities. Critical approaches therefore caution against romanticizing commoning and instead foregrounding the embeddedness of care within broader structures of power.

Care and Climate Justice

Attention to care within climate justice scholarship has been relatively limited (Amorim-Maia et al., 2022), though recent work highlights its importance for sustaining movements, building solidarities, and responding to climate harms (Bond, Thomas, and Diprose, 2020; Nicoson, 2024; Parris and Williams, 2019; Santos, 2019; Sultana, 2022). A key theme in this scholarship is that climate justice is fundamentally relational, grounded in everyday practices of sustaining human and more-than-human life. Law (2024), for instance, describes farmers’ responses to extreme weather in Central New York as practices of care, while Nicoson (2024) shows how communities in Puerto Rico understand climate change through reciprocal caring relationships.

Scholars increasingly argue that care and justice are inseparable. Wrigley (2025) identifies intergenerational, distributive, procedural, recognitional, and corrective dimensions of care within climate justice activism. Similarly, Preston and Carr (2018) argue that care reveals recognitional injustices often absent in climate engineering debates, while Bond and Barth (2020) show that just adaptation emerges through institutionalized forms of care.

Climate justice scholarship also emphasizes that contemporary climate crises are inseparable from histories of colonialism and racial capitalism that unequally distribute environmental harms and vulnerabilities (Sultana, 2022; Whyte, 2017). Colonial relations not only extracted land and labor but also devalued particular lives, knowledges, and forms of care. Consequently, Indigenous, Black, racialized, and Global South communities often experience disproportionate climate vulnerability despite contributing least to emissions.

Decolonial and feminist scholars argue that climate coloniality shapes whose suffering is recognized, whose knowledge counts, and who performs the labor of sustaining communities and movements (Federici, 2012; Ranganathan and Bratman, 2021; Sultana, 2022). Care is therefore not politically neutral. Participation in climate movements, exposure to risk, and the burden of emotional and organizational labor are shaped by histories of racialization, migration, dispossession, and privilege. An ethic of care is useful for understanding these dynamics because it foregrounds interdependence, unequal vulnerability, and responsibility (Tronto, 1993). This is particularly important for understanding why racialized activists may experience activist spaces differently even within movements committed to justice.

Radical Experiments in Care and Commoning

Care and commoning have also been institutionalized through radical political experiments that challenge capitalism, racism, colonialism, and individualism through collective forms of mutual aid and social reproduction (Spade, 2020). Groups such as the Diggers, Kaliflower commune, the Black Panther Party, Oakland Community School exposed institutional neglect while transforming care into a political practice and creating infrastructures for organizing free food programs, healthcare, shelter, education, and community support systems (Bhatia, 2023) The Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program, resulted in the establishment of the national free breakfast program in the United States in 1975. This is a rare example of how a grassroots collective care program for Black communities came to be institutionalized at the federal level. Another example includes the Haight Street Commons in San Francisco a self-described “decentralized ecosystem of self-governing communities”, that drew lessons from the perceived failures of the communes from the 1960s and 1970s and developed experimental commoning practices for organizing, managing, and governing resources, labor, and service. This helped them distribute personal protective equipment equitably during the COVID-19 pandemic (Bhatia, 2023).

Similar practices continue through feminist, abolitionist, Indigenous, and mutual aid movements that organize childcare, food provision, emotional support, healing practices, and political education in response to precarity and exclusion (Spade, 2020). These experiments demonstrate that care is not simply interpersonal or private but deeply political, shaping how communities survive, resist, and create infrastructures to institutionalize care practices.

Building on this scholarship, I examine how youth climate justice activists practice and negotiate care within a predominantly white university-based movement through an intersectional lens.

1. Climate Justice University Collective (CJUC)

CJUC, a predominantly female-led grassroots group, emerged from an earlier campus-based climate action group focused on the fossil-fuel divestment movement at a Canadian university. Following a period of decline during the COVID-19 pandemic, the group was reorganized and relaunched with a renewed emphasis on climate justice, anti-colonialism, and equity. The collective’s overarching goal is to pressure universities to dissociate from the fossil-fuel industry while supporting a just transition away from fossil fuels. In practice, the group combines campaigns on fossil fuel divestment, fossil-free research, and financial institutions’ ties to fossil fuels with broader coalition-building efforts alongside climate justice, Indigenous solidarity, and social justice organizations. More specifically, their activism targets the financial ties between universities and banks, especially the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), a top fossil-fuel financier since 2019 (Rainforest Action Network et al., 2024). Their boldest actions include disrupting high-profile events in March–April 2023 to pressure the university to cut ties with RBC, an 18-day occupation, the university’s longest, backed by 250+ students and 750 faculty and organizations. Following this, the Board of Regents approved a plan to divest from fossil-fuels by 2030.

CJUC operates through a decentralized and non-hierarchical structure organized around multiple working groups focused on specific campaigns. Alongside working-group meetings, CJUC holds regular general meetings to coordinate across campaigns. Decision-making is consensus-oriented and democratic, with major proposals discussed collectively during meetings and through online communication platforms to enable broader participation. While CJUC rejects formal hierarchical titles, participants noted that more experienced members often assume facilitative or coordinating roles, such as moderating meetings, maintaining institutional memory, documenting discussions, and ensuring accountability for agreed-upon tasks. Members described the group as “leaderful rather than leaderless,” where individuals are encouraged to step into leadership roles based on their interests, capacities, and availability rather than through fixed authority structures.

CJUC also intentionally cultivates practices to foster inclusion, community, and relationality within the group that are now institutionalized. Meetings commonly begin with check-ins designed to create space for community-building. Members are encouraged to move between working groups, participate according to their capacities, and step back during periods of burnout or academic pressure without losing membership. Participants described these practices as central to sustaining long-term involvement and building a sense of trust within the group. Interviewees also reflected on ongoing tensions associated with decentralized organizing, including uneven participation, recurring needs to onboard new members, ambiguities around responsibility and accountability, and challenges in balancing openness and flexibility with organizational structure and continuity. Participants noted that CJUC’s non-hierarchical structure often resulted in emotional and invisible labor related to facilitation, mentorship, accountability, and community care being unevenly distributed, with more experienced members frequently taking on invisible work. These tensions formed an important backdrop for understanding how practices of care and commoning unfolded within CJUC.

Data Collection and Analysis

Between March 2023 and December 2024, the author and two research assistants conducted 21 interviews with CJUC members (see Figure 2 below). Of the 21 participants, 12 identified as female, five as male, and four as non-binary. Fourteen identified as white and seven as racialized or mixed race. Four participants identified as queer and two as immigrants. Several participants held overlapping identities across these categories. Initial contact with the group leader was made via email in March 2023, with additional members recruited at a Fall 2023 open house. Using snowball sampling, interviews continued until saturation. All participants gave informed consent. Interviews, held over Zoom, lasted 60–90 minutes, and were recorded and transcribed by the research assistants. Using Fisher and Tronto’s (1993) ethic of care, I developed a codebook with four key concepts: caring about, caring for, caregiving, and care-receiving and adopted an an intersectional lens of race and gender for analysis. To enhance rater reliability, I conducted two coding cycles, two months apart, achieving a 95% agreement rate. In the results, I have used pseudonyms to refer to members of the CJCU.

Figure 2

Care About

Caring about recognizes the existence of a need and determines that the need should be addressed. All respondents expressed concern about climate change, climate activism, institutional environmental action, environmental policies, and finding community, which motivated them to join CJUC. No differences emerged across race or gender.

Care for

Caring for involves taking responsibility for a need and deciding how to meet it (Tronto, 1993). At CJUC, one expression of caring for involved bonding activities such as shared meals, picnics, and outings for community-building and sustaining friendships. As Interviewee 3 noted:

I think something that our group has is community care and people really taking care of fellow organizers. I think if we didn’t implement that, our group would no longer exist. That looks like holding community meals and having bonding activities, going to parks together, and actually making the time because we organize together and we’re such big parts of each other’s lives. I think caring for one another is such a big thing.

A second form of caring for involved rituals such as opening check-ins and closing temperature checks, institutionalized through a “care pod” or care committee supporting members’ emotional and physical well-being. As Interviewee 18 explained:

We have a ritual at the start of every meeting. For example, we do check-in and check-out questions or more person-to-person check-ins, or debriefing. Before an action, we are checking on each other to see how people are feeling. Having that before and after is inspired by different activists and other people who told us that these rituals should be implemented in every action that we do, as well as implementing socials. That is something that we wanted to include as a part of care to bring people together.

Care for also emerged through collective responses to burnout and rest. Members described stepping in for one another and normalizing temporary withdrawal from organizing. As Interviewee 3 reflected:

It [resting] helps with care, downtime, and relaxation because it makes us feel closer when other people are struggling or burned out. It makes it easier for them to come to us and open up when they struggle with burnout and need to take a step back, and people are really understanding. Some people have taken a step back for six months and then they come back, and they are a lot stronger.

This ethos of care supports sustainable engagement by recognizing individual limits as vital to collective well-being. It frames care for not just as responsibility, but as creating space for vulnerability, rest, and long-term participation, embedding care in the group’s commoning practices.

A fourth form of caring for involved onboarding and mentorship practices aimed at empowering newer members. As Interviewee 5 shared:

I’ve really tried to care for new members in the group and make them feel empowered and encourage them to take on tasks and responsibility. This is something I think is really important in leadership roles; to uplift newer members and make them feel they could be leaders also. I pushed them to become more involved and more confident, which has been really awesome. That’s something that I love about leadership—being able to empower other people and watch other people grow. I think it is so powerful, heartwarming, and something that I find really awesome and meaningful. It makes you feel good.

These practices institutionalize care through rituals of bonding, support, mentorship, and rest into the group’s commoning practices.

Care Giving

Caregiving involves meeting needs through embodied physical and emotional labor (Tronto, 1993). Unlike caring about and caring for, caregiving practices in CJUC are shaped by racial and immigration status. Physical acts of caregiving included participation in an 18-day occupation advocating for fossil fuel divestment. However, racialized members and first-generation immigrants often hesitated to participate because of fears of retaliation. As one racialized, first-generation immigrant explained: “I’m an international student, so protesting inside a building for hours is not the best thing to do for me.”

While some white members recognized that racial privilege insulated them from institutional repercussions, this recognition did not always extend to understanding the structural barriers faced by racialized and immigrant members. White members often misinterpreted the absence of racialized members from direct actions as a lack of confidence, capacity, or commitment, rather than as a response to structural risks. As Interviewee 8 remarked:

I recognize that as a white person, I have to do as much as I can to ensure greater racial diversity in the serious decisions that are made. The struggle with that is partly a lack of capacity. We know that a number of our racialized members can’t make meetings frequently, and they also can’t attend meetings as frequently. Or rather, they don’t have the confidence to engage in some of the more high-risk or public-facing actions, both of which limits their ability to meaningfully put their hands on the levers of change.

This quote highlights a disregard for structural inequality, where risk-averse behavior is framed as a personal failing. In CJUC, physical acts of caregiving reveal the limitations of care when dominant group members fail to recognize how race, immigration status, and institutional power affect participation. This disconnect illustrates how caregiving and neglect can coexist, particularly when caregiving practices overlook the unequal vulnerabilities within the group, despite the group’s goal of advancing climate justice. For racialized members and first-generation immigrants from the Global South, participating in high-risk actions is not about confidence but about navigating the tangible risks of institutional and legal precarity, which could result in severe consequences like university suspension or deportation. These structural realities are often invisible in the group’s dominant narratives. As Interviewee 18 said,

Most of the group leaders who decide what gets done on most of the work and who are very actively involved are white. In the beginning, it was a bit hard to cope with that. I’m not white and I could see that other people of color being a bit uncomfortable and being put into situations where the experience of being racialized is not understood by white folks.

It further reveals uneven recognition among white activists of the links between climate justice, coloniality, and racialized precarity.

A second form of caregiving involves emotional labor, disproportionately performed by non-white and queer members to create inclusive and safer spaces within CJUC. This includes advocating for the recognition of racialized members’ experiences, facilitating difficult conversations, engaging in repair work, and providing emotional support to marginalized members that maintain group cohesion and advance justice-oriented goals. While some white members expressed learning about their own identity and privilege to uplift others, they did not provide concrete examples of supporting racialized members or recognizing the emotional labor of racialized members. For instance, Interviewee 6 said, “I think it’s something that I’m learning at the moment. I have, for a large part of my life, been involved in circles that are filled with people like me. I think this club and space has a lot more diversity within it and I’m learning about my identity, and I should make room to work on it.”

Interviewee 3 further noted the disconnect between white and racialized members, where white members are unaware of the what kinds of care are required in a racialized setting,

People have this want to uplift Black voices and voices from the global South and they really want to do their best to do all these things, but in practice they don’t. It’s written in our constitution and values and principles documents, but it has taken so much work and so much pushback from me and other racialized students to get them to actually implement what they say they want to do. Even after we have pushed for that, a lot of white students’ approach this from a white savior point of view. So, I get very coddled and it’s almost like they feel sorry for me all the time, and that has made it a bit difficult to implement solid change.

Interviewees also noted that racialized members often bore the burden of emotional labor without adequate recognition or support. As Interviewee 3 said, “It’s often the racialized students who feel like they’re putting a lot of work into the organization and not getting that appreciation back.” The lack of acknowledgment of emotional caregiving led to several racialized members to leave and join an off-campus climate justice group. Thus, while emotional caregiving fosters community-building, it can also reinforce inequalities when the labor is not equitably shared or valued, despite the group’s commitment to justice.

These dynamics reveal uneven understandings among some white activists of what anti-racist and decolonial care requires in practice. While several white members described learning about privilege, racialized participants noted that symbolic commitments to diversity did not always translate into meaningful redistribution of emotional labor or institutional risk. As a result, the work of navigating racism, facilitating difficult conversations, and sustaining inclusive spaces continued to fall disproportionately on racialized members themselves. This suggests that care within climate justice organizing requires not only recognition and empathy, but also reflexive engagement with whiteness, privilege, and the colonial dimensions of climate justice.

Even while racialized students experience marginalization in the group, their shared experiences of marginalization bring them closer and foster reciprocal relationships of mutual care. Interviewee 5 said,

There are a lot of conversations around the racial dynamics in our group. My best friend Alice and I have navigated a lot of that together and really giving care to each other through all of that. She always has just been there to debrief and work through things together. I feel it’s definitely been a mutual recurring relationship, but I think that has really helped me through a lot of the internal issues that have come up this year.

Consequently, relations of solidarity and mutual care were often strongest among marginalized members who shared experiences of exclusion.

Care-Receiving

Care-receiving involves active responses to care that make members feel validated, seen, and heard. Participants described these experiences as strengthening trust, intimacy, and solidarity. As Interviewee 17 shared:

Nina is just the most caring person ever. She’s just fabulous, so compassionate, and she’s such a good listener and she’s really good at validating you. But also, she’ll tell you to get real with yourself. She’s real with you, even when she’s compassionate and caring, which I think is really good. I think often we fall into these spaces where it’s just ‘Yes, I hear you, I listen to you,’ but when they tell you ‘I’m really sorry but you also need to do better,’ that type of care—it’s so powerful. She’s just awesome and she’s made me feel so treasured and awesome.

This form of care, where honesty and compassion coexist, builds trust and intimacy, and strengthens emotional connections. Many examples of emotional attentiveness and relational maintenance were associated with members read as female or queer, suggesting that care-receiving was shaped by gendered expectations around emotional labor. For racialized members, care-receiving was particularly meaningful because it challenged experiences of marginalization. As Interviewee 3 noted shared experiences of struggle and mutual support created a deeper sense of solidarity, trust, and relational reciprocity:

I think caring gave us a unique bond. She knows she can come to me with anything that is unrelated to this. And I felt I could also come to her now because we know we were kind of united by a similar struggle. And that has opened the doors for a lot of things for us. When she sees opportunities for racialized climate justice students, she gives them to me, and I will do the same. This has allowed us to grow in the same way, and we’re always looking out for each other.

These “unique bonds” between caregiver and care receiver are not incidental but are the foundation of commoning that fosters a collective subjectivity of “being in common”. Through these ongoing reciprocal acts of care, members come to see each other not merely as co-organizers, but as co-inhabitants of a shared emotional and political space, bound by shared experiences, trust, and mutual uplift. At the same time, these findings suggest that care within commoning relationships cannot be reduced to transactional exchange but instead reflects ongoing practices of relational support and collective belonging.

Caring With

In CJUC, caring with embodied solidarity and mutual support across movements. The group collaborates with climate justice, Indigenous, trans advocacy, and Pro-Palestine organizations through petitions, protests, resource-sharing, and coalition-building. Interviewees emphasized that these collaborations strengthened visibility and political power. As Interviewee 6 noted: “Solidarity makes everyone’s movement stronger, especially within the university community. No matter what you are looking for, numbers always make your point come across. Especially for a club like CJUC, it’s very important to show solidarity with other clubs because we believe that an issue is not on its own. It’s part of a larger movement.”

This ethic of mutual recognition and shared struggle fosters a collective subjectivity—an orientation of “being in common” with others, but this sense of “being in common” was unevenly experienced across race and migration status. While solidarity was extended toward other political struggles, white members did not always articulate how climate justice itself is entangled with colonial histories and uneven exposure to institutional risk. As a result, solidarity sometimes remained conditional on forms of participation that did not fundamentally challenge whiteness or the unequal vulnerabilities experienced by racialized and immigrant members.

Additionally, solidarity does not always equate to agreement. A key conflict emerged around CJUC’s support for the Pro-Palestine movement, where public expressions of solidarity, such as statements and protests, led to tensions, including the departure of Jewish members and others who disagreed with the group’s stance. As Interviewee 13 reflected: “There have been conflicts, especially around our support for Palestine and certain people that didn’t agree with our stance and with the statement that we wanted to put out. Some people did end up leaving and I felt bad because I felt like I didn’t necessarily support people as much as I should have.”

For some participants, these tensions highlighted the complexities of practicing solidarity across difference. As Interviewee 18 said, “When we had the Palestine thing, it was very easy for me to say, “We have to pressure and make that part of our work” because I’m an international student.” For some interviewees the group’s political positioning on Palestine intersected with their personal identity in ways that alienated them from the group. Interviewee 6 said,

Being Jewish and Israeli has prevented my further involvement in the organization because I’m not comfortable with the political stance they’ve taken on the Israel-Palestine conflict. It’s very one-sided. I think I’m not really accepted into the space anymore because of that aspect of my identity and because of my political views, which I think is wrong because the climate fight is for everyone. This is why I haven’t been involved this year and further in the organization.

In activist spaces, boundaries of belonging are often shaped by ideological alignment, and efforts to expand solidarity, while meaningful for some, can exclude others. This raises questions about the limits of commoning: when solidarity is extended to some political struggles, it may alienate those with differing identities or views. These tensions reveal that caring with requires reflexive engagement with how coloniality and racial privilege shape whose emotions and participation are recognized as legitimate within climate justice movements themselves. Caring with, thus, demands ongoing negotiation of values, priorities, and inclusion, highlighting the challenging work of building solidarities that are both principled and relational. After some members left in response to CJUC’s decision to support the Pro-Palestine movement, the group focused on repairing relationships and sustaining the group through political and emotional tensions, rooted in caring for and caregiving. Interviewee 17 said,

I have worked to address my conflict with people by reaching out to them and saying, ‘Let’s get lunch and let’s talk, tell me what exactly was harmful and let me speak to why that was how I acted and how I know that it was wrong and the reflection I’ve done.’ I think that the organization can do as many big conflict meetings as we want and we can implement as much anti-oppression structure as we want, but at the end of the day, if people aren’t talking to each other, I don’t think it will really do anything.

Such efforts to engage in repair highlight the importance of holding space for difficult conversations, especially in justice-oriented movements that seek to be inclusive while also taking principled political stances.

Care as Relational Infrastructure for Commoning

Drawing on Tronto’s phases of care, I find that caring about and caring for function as relational infrastructure within CJCU, forging new social relations and subjectivities (Nightingale, 2019; Singh, 2013). Care for illustrates overlooked or undervalued practices, expressed through mentorship, onboarding rituals, and check-ins that build and sustain climate justice advocacy (Williams, 2017). These forms of care produce affective ties that deepen commitment and belonging, what Nightingale (2013) calls the emotional basis of commoning. However, these relations of belonging are unevenly experienced by racialized and immigrant members. For them care practices became important mechanisms for navigating exclusions, vulnerabilities, and institutional precarity that emerge from broader histories of coloniality.

Commoning relations situated in care emerge through the exercise of power, a generative force that enables action and the capacity to affect others (Tronto, 1993). In this context, caring for becomes a source of power for those who perform it. Meanwhile, caregiving and care-receiving inculcate a shared sense of struggle and belonging, especially among racialized members, producing subjectivities grounded in collective identification and mutual support. It is in moments of emotional care, being witnessed and supported, that political bonds were most powerfully forged, illustrating caregiving and care-receiving as “powers of the weak” (Tronto, 1993).

The Contradictions of Caring: Power, “Privileged Irresponsibility,” and Exclusion

While caregiving and care-receiving foster a sense of “being in common,” it does not lead to inclusive commoning. They can just as easily generate distrust and exclusion, reproduce existing inequalities, and generate new forms of marginalization. Physical acts of caregiving tied to divestment campaigns sometimes marginalized racialized and immigrant members, particularly in relation to high-risk activism. White members occasionally framed racialized members’ absence from direct action as a lack of confidence or capacity, rather than recognizing it as a rational response to unequal exposure to surveillance, institutional punishment, or legal precarity.

Although white activists often articulated solidarity with anti-colonial and climate justice struggles externally, they did not always recognize how coloniality shaped internal group dynamics. As a result, whiteness continued to shape what counted as legitimate political participation, while racialized forms of caution or disengagement were rendered unintelligible within dominant activist narratives. These dynamics reflect what Tronto (1993) describes as “privileged irresponsibility,” where those with relative power fail to recognize the risks and burdens carried by others. Explicit acknowledgement of these differentiated risks and privileges may have fostered more inclusive and relational forms of solidarity, particularly for racialized and immigrant members navigating institutional vulnerability.”

Racialized and queer members also undertook disproportionate emotional labor within the collective. This labor resembles what feminist political economists describe as reproductive labor: the often-invisible work of sustaining relationships, emotional well-being, organizational continuity, and collective functioning (Federici, 2012). Yet this labor did not necessarily produce equitable conditions for them, and some eventually exited CJUC. Thus, while Wrigley (2025) frames caregiving and care-receiving as procedural justice (defined as equitable access to decision-making forums), this framing must grapple with the inequities embedded in caring practices, including who performs care, who benefits from it, and the uneven burden of emotional and affective labor (Williams, 2017). Without addressing these dynamics, both physical and emotional caregiving co-exist with neglect that reproduce rather than dismantle systemic inequalities within movements for justice.

Caring With and the Fragility of Political Solidarity

Caring with is how CJUC enacted interdependence as a political strategy by sharing resources, knowledge, and organizing labor across movements. These practices align with Tronto’s vision of collective responsibility grounded in democratic values. Yet this phase of care also exposed the fragility of coalition-based organizing. CJUC’s support for Palestine led to the withdrawal of some Jewish members and others who disagreed with the group’s stance, producing new exclusions within the collective. As Nightingale (2019) argues, strong communitarian bonds do not guarantee inclusion; they can also produce in-groups and out-groups where only certain claims are recognized as legitimate.

The findings further suggest that solidarity within climate justice movements is not merely coalition-building, but must involve reflexive engagement with whiteness, coloniality, and differential positionalities within movements themselves. While CJUC articulated solidarity with anti-colonial struggles externally, white activists had not fully examined how privilege shaped whose emotions, risks, and political perspectives were recognized internally. Thus, “being in common” remained partial and unevenly experienced across members.

Toward more equitable practices of commoning in youth groups

The findings demonstrate that practices of care must be intentionally cultivated through ongoing reflexivity about power, privilege, participation, and relationality within the group itself. These findings suggest that practices of commoning require not only collective political goals but also deliberate attention to whose labor sustains the collective, whose needs are recognized, and whose voices shape decision-making processes. Shared political commitments alone do not dissolve structural inequalities, since coloniality, whiteness, and racialized power relations may continue to shape participation, recognition, and the distribution of care labor even within justice-oriented spaces.

The findings further suggest that non-hierarchical organizing structures do not necessarily eliminate inequalities, as informal hierarchies may still emerge through differences in race, experience, confidence, time availability, and familiarity with activist spaces (Mudaliar, Firinne, and Boykins, forthcoming). More equitable forms of commoning therefore require reflective practices that make invisible labor visible, create space for conversations about burnout and privilege, and foster substantive rather than symbolic inclusion. By focusing on caring about, caring for, caregiving, care-receiving, and caring with, the article demonstrates that care itself must become an ongoing collective and political practice.