A writer and cultural critic who treated love as an ethical practice rather than a passing feeling, tied directly to justice and community. Her work argues that people cannot flourish in isolation.

A writer and organizer who documents how disabled communities keep one another alive through networks of care. Their work is candid about both the beauty and the strain of that labor.

A poet, essayist, and educator who wrote with urgency about justice, love, and mutual belonging. Her work holds that political commitment and personal tenderness are inseparable.

A poet and scholar who draws on the traditions of radical Black mothering and the natural world to explore collective survival. Her writing reimagines care as shared, political work.

A writer and facilitator whose concept of "emergent strategy" holds that large-scale change grows from small, trusting relationships. Her work encourages movements to move at the speed of trust.

A philosopher who contends that dependence is an ordinary human condition rather than a failure. Drawing on her experience raising a disabled child, she argues that we are all some mother's child.

A scholar, author, and abolitionist whose Women, Race & Class examined how race and class shape who performs society's caregiving. Her work connects the freedom of some to the freedom of all.

A writer, scholar, and activist who helped define Black feminism as both a movement and an intellectual tradition. She co-authored the Combahee River Collective Statement and edited foundational anthologies of Black women's writing.

 A civil rights organizer who believed that strong movements do not require strong leaders, and who built participatory, grassroots democracy from the ground up. Her approach shaped a generation of organizing.

A philosopher and Detroit organizer whose seven decades of activism centered the idea that people transform themselves by caring for one another. Her later work reimagined revolution as the patient building of community.

A lawyer, writer, and organizer who makes the case for mutual aid as an act of solidarity rather than charity. His work has become a practical handbook for communities building networks of care.

An abolitionist geographer known for the principle that "where life is precious, life is precious." She argues that genuine safety comes from investment and care rather than punishment.

A Vietnamese Zen teacher who coined the term "interbeing" to describe how all things depend on one another. He made a profound idea feel plain and usable in daily life.

A botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation who writes about reciprocity with the living world as a way of life. Her idea of the "Honorable Harvest" offers a practice of taking only what one can give back to.

A literary scholar whose essays transformed how kinship, gender, and Black life under slavery are understood. Her work is foundational to contemporary Black studies.

A pioneering science-fiction writer whose Earthseed novels imagine communities that survive collapse by adapting and depending on one another. Her work is a touchstone for thinking about collective resilience.

A poet and essayist who argued that no one lives a single-issue life and that our struggles are therefore bound together. She also described caring for oneself as an act of survival rather than indulgence.

A Nigerian philosopher, poet, and psychologist whose idea of "post-activism" invites people to slow down and notice how deeply entangled they already are. His work extends interdependence to the more-than-human world.

A writer, editor, and filmmaker whose 1970 anthology The Black Woman helped establish Black women's writing as a field of its own. Her fiction and essays treated community and collective care as central to Black life.

A disability justice organizer who developed the idea of "crip ancestorship," the wisdom and care passed between disabled people across generations. She emphasized that our deepest kinship is often chosen.

A feminist writer and organizer who has spent decades documenting the unpaid care work that sustains society. Her work values that labor without romanticizing it or ignoring who bears its cost.

A writer and organizer who helped launch the international Wages for Housework campaign in the 1970s. She insisted that unpaid domestic and caring labor is the foundation on which the entire economy rests

A sociologist who showed how race, class, and gender operate as one interlocking system, which she named the matrix of domination. Her work is a cornerstone of Black feminist thought.

 A group of Black feminists who declared, in 1977, that if Black women were free, everyone would be free. Their statement articulated the idea that liberation is interdependent and collective.

An organizer and educator who champions community-based safety and the conviction that "hope is a discipline." Her work builds the habit of turning toward one another rather than toward punishment.

A philosopher of education who argued that the relationship between the one caring and the one cared for is the foundation of ethics. Her work helped establish care as a distinct moral approach.

 A therapist and author whose book My Grandmother's Hands examines how trauma, especially racialized trauma, is carried in the body and healed through it. His work connects individual healing to collective repair.

 A disability justice writer and educator who places interdependence at the heart of her work, arguing that needing one another is a strength rather than a deficiency. She originated the concepts of access intimacy and pod mapping.

A pioneering disability rights leader whose organizing helped secure the access laws that many disabled people depend on today. She is often called the mother of the disability rights movement.

 A poet whose spare, luminous verse honored the body, family, and the endurance of ordinary Black life. Her poems find dignity and connection in the everyday.