About
Caring Workspaces project aims to make our workspaces more inclusive, diverse, caring and safe by prioritizing gender+ perspective. The COVID-19 pandemic created inevitable and deep transformations in work life practices. We aim to lead the way that the transformations in caring responsibilities are addressed from a perspective of equity, inclusivity and employee wellbeing.
The scope of the study
This project primarily aims for transformation in the workspaces of civil society and public benefit organizations. To this aim, it’s scope includes i) a research into organizations and organizational practices in Turkey and Europe which can serve as good examples in terms of being a caring workspace; ii) a checklist for organizations’ self-assessment, and iii) a campaign that puts the good practices to vote for visibility and encouragement. The project, a pilot study of RESISTIRÉ*, will be completed by the end of 2022. RESISTIRÉ is a Europe-wide consortium for developing policy proposals against gender-based inequalities created by the COVID-19 pandemic.
* RESpondIng to outbreakS through co-creaTIve inclusive equality stRatEgies
What is a caring approach?
The caring approach reveals and aims to prevent the unequal division of roles in caregiving and receiving created as a result of binary systems of gender. It brings the marginalized care needs to the center of work life, and assumes care needs as mutual responsibility. A workspace can be defined as caring if it aims to become physically inclusive; ensure its employees’ care needs, working conditions and rights; develop policies and programs for their wellbeing, and maintain equal and participatory decision-making at all levels.
Why caring workspaces?
As civil society professionals and volunteers working on social good and human rights, despite often being exposed to high levels of stress and precarious working conditions, we seldom talk about our employee rights, mental health and wellbeing. The pressure on our wellbeing only intensified with the COVID-19 pandemic, as home-based work has blurred the boundaries between paid and unpaid areas of our lives. Workers who are expected to be “always available for work” in both space and time experienced performance anxiety. These have put tremendous pressure on working parents and were almost always exacerbated in relation to inequalities based on gender, age, race/ethnicity, class, disability and sexuality.
Nevertheless, it is also during this period that discussions and queries around care gained new momentum, enabling for new practices to flourish. With the Caring Workspaces project, our goal is to develop a workspace practice that addresses these challenges and encourages inclusivity, diversity and care for employees.
Gender and intersectionality
In the Caring Workspaces project, we adopt a gender+ perspective. This approach highlights that gendered inequalities often arise at the intersection of inequalities related to age, race/ethnicity, class, disability and sexuality. As Postane and Hafıza Merkezi, we recognize these differences and relations in the process of developing equitable and inclusive policies in our workspaces and encourage organizations to recognize such differences in order to raise awareness.
Who runs the project?
The project is jointly run by Postane and Hafıza Merkezi, and supported by the RESISTIRÉ project funded by EU Horizons 2020. Postane is a collective production space for those whose work focuses on social, environmental and urban impact. Hafıza Merkezi is a civil society organization that works on human rights violations and gives institutional support to rights-based organizations. The two organizations join their experience and network in their respective fields of human rights and social entrepreneurship, for the support of democratization in our working lives.
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