Across sectors, including higher education, organizations are restructuring in response to ongoing financial, economic and political pressures. Many employees are navigating difficult job transitions, whether planned or unexpected. Job disruptions also ripple outward to HR professionals, where expectations of neutrality can make work isolating, especially for those in leadership roles.
Whether you are experiencing job disruption yourself or working closely with those who are impacted, collective care is a powerful way to counter isolation and tackle uncertainty together rather than alone. Reframing job loss and the work of supporting someone through it as shaped by larger systems — not personal failures — makes it easier to let go of shame and recognize that no one should carry this weight alone.
How Collective Care Transformed Our Journeys
Bianca’s Story
As someone who was laid off, I found an unexpected depth of connection with former colleagues navigating unemployment alongside me. Additionally, friends (including my co-author, Shaila), family, and professional peers offered crucial emotional support and practical guidance as I searched for work. Before my layoff, my role gave me a sense of purpose, confidence and visibility. Colleagues often described me as a “light” in my profession. After the layoff, that light felt extinguished. Like many in this circumstance, I experienced despair, anxiety, depression and shame. I am embarrassed to admit that I began to see myself as a “loser,” doubting my talents, skills and worthiness. My response was not unique; it echoed what many laid-off workers quietly carry: the internalization of structural decisions as personal failure.
Before my layoff, my role gave me a sense of purpose. Colleagues often described me as a “light” in my profession. After the layoff, that light felt extinguished.
My perspective began to shift when I joined a collective of women of color, which we named Entrance Strategy. A hybrid community of employed and unemployed professionals, we met to share dreams, aspirations, and concrete strategies while envisioning our next steps. The space offered both strength and permission. We confronted the material and emotional realities of job loss. I released shame and rebuilt confidence. From that foundation, I felt comfortable seeking external networks that provided connections, references and interview preparation.
Shaila’s Story
Although I am employed, I have seen many friends and colleagues experience significant job losses. Job loss leads to financial instability, changes in housing, lack of childcare and more. I, too, have experienced this in my life through family members. When my community suffers, I empathize with their pain and seek to provide support however I can. I consider the ways my community uplifted me during difficult career phases and transitions. Giving back gives me a sense of purpose and aligns with my values of community, love and mutual support. I want my friends and colleagues to have stability, be successful on their own terms, and thrive in life. Many in my community have had to fight for their seat at the table and find their own way. I want to change that by being part of a safety net to ease their path forward in difficult situations. Who are we if we cannot show up for each other during our struggles?
How Collective Care Can Build Community and Support Career Trajectories
What Is Collective Care? Collective care is the practice of building and sustaining community networks that prioritize mutual support, well-being and shared responsibility. It acknowledges both systemic and individual hardships and responds with intentional care, connection and resource-sharing. Collective care reminds us that healing, resilience, and professional growth do not occur in isolation, but rather in community.
How Can We Practice Individual and Collective Care? When practicing care, whether individually or collectively, there are many practical ways to uplift yourself and others. Draw from the five strategies below, following your intuition to what brings you positivity and rejuvenation.
Strategy #1: Identifying Your Collective Care Network
First, establish your collective care network, otherwise known as your social capital. Your social capital exists in many places and consists of the relationships, both loose and strong connections, you have cultivated in your lifetime. These connections do not have to be limited to professional relationships.
A helpful way to map this network is to identify individuals through three interconnected categories:
- Academic Network. Those connected to your academic journey from elementary school through higher education.
- Professional Network. Colleagues, collaborators and supervisors across your career trajectory, including internships and early career roles.
- Heart and Hype Network. Those who nurture you and offer joy and encouragement.
Begin with a goal of identifying three people in each category, recognizing that this network can evolve and expand over time. Your collective care network can connect you to opportunities, resources, referrals and new communities. Your network is not only about professional connections or upskilling, but also about encouraging you and keeping your spirits and hope alive. They can remind you of your skills, brilliance and worth during moments of doubt. These relationships nourish energy and fortitude.
When mapping your social capital, consider the following key questions:
- Who can offer a listening ear and hold emotional space?
- What skills do you want to strengthen and who can support that growth?
- Who inspires you and who have you learned from?
- Who can reflect your magic: your skills, knowledge, wins and abilities?
- Who is missing from your list? Who could help connect you to these individuals?
Strategy #2: Maintaining Relationships
After mapping your collective care network, determine how to engage individuals and groups sustainably. Maintaining relationships, even loosely, can make a world of difference in times of need. Consider ways that feel authentic to you to create long-lasting connections.
As an individual, develop a practice to check in on your community.
- Contact people to let them know you’re thinking of them or to share an uplifting story.
- Send job opportunities to others that match their skill sets.
- Identify shared interests with different individuals in your three networks, and emphasize opportunities for advancing together and celebrating each other.
As a collective, develop practices that engage your groups.
- Schedule standing group check-ins online or in-person. Consider cost-effective gatherings that emphasize care, like potlucks or walks in nature.
- Bring friends from across your three networks together when they share common interests. This can be for personal or professional growth and can lead to unexpected conversations, connections and skill-building.
- Host gatherings to co-work and hype each other up. For example, work on resumes together, search for jobs together or apply for jobs together. Collective knowledge and support can strengthen your materials and your mindsets.
- Find opportunities for professional development reciprocity. Consider hosting a professional development workshop for your group by offering to trade for a service of your own.
Strategy #3: Affirmations as a Professional Practice
Affirmations are verbal or written statements that acknowledge our talents, skills, brilliance, values and personhood. Affirmations can serve as personal and collective tools for amplifying self-image amid challenging moments. If giving self-affirmations, consider saying them to yourself in a mirror and notice your body language. An alternative option is to write them down and read them when managing a difficult situation, such as not receiving a job after multiple rounds of interviews. When giving affirmations to others, ask what they need and how they are struggling, which will result in a more specific affirmation that is responsive to the moment.
Affirmations for individual care. Develop a daily self-affirming practice.
- “I bring valuable (name your skills, such as creativity, imagination, strategy, etc.) to the table.”
- “I am proud of how I am holding on to (name your values, such as courage, kindness, etc.) during this heavy time.”
- “Future me would remind current me that ______.”
Affirmations for collective care.
- Offer LinkedIn reviews or public shout-outs highlighting colleagues’ skills and contributions.
- Send emails of appreciation, affirmation or professional introductions to former supervisors, collaborators or peers. These gestures strengthen collective visibility and opportunity.
- Reflect back to your community their worth, drawing on examples from the past where they overcame a difficult time and grew from it.
Strategy #4: Documenting and Envisioning Success
The ability to visualize success, even when situations seem dire, can help you continue moving forward. Practice revisiting and reflecting on the positive direction you are seeking and how to achieve it, which can help sustain your journey.
- Create a digital or paper vision board that reflects your dream life and career with a positive mindset. Positivity helps dispel limiting beliefs and affirms our boldest dreams and aspirations.
- Share your vision board with a trusted community member or establish a vision board community for accountability, encouragement and collective imagination.
- Engage in professional practices, connections and opportunities that align with this vision. Seek out references, referrals or mutual support from your vision board community and collective care network.
The ability to visualize success, even when situations seem dire, can help you continue moving forward.
Strategy #5: Grounding and Reframing Your Journey
Along your journey, you will face times of waiting, ghosting, rejection and the unknown, evoking strong, perhaps unproductive emotions. Managing your emotions, individually and collectively, will benefit your long-term mental and emotional health. A mantra to remember: We have control over emotions; our emotions do not have to control us.
Check in on yourself and how you are feeling.
- Ask yourself: What is the story or narrative I am telling myself? How can I reframe this narrative and offer a compassionate response? What is the truth about myself, what is the evidence of my situation, and what is the structural context?
- Find a creative way to identify the emotions you are feeling. Compare your emotions to weather patterns and draw your weather; compare them to an existing landscape and have each of your emotions be a part of that landscape; or compare them to carnival rides and identify which rides you are currently on. Find whatever analogy works for you and add a visual to better self-reflect and build your self-awareness.
- Find a guided meditation that reflects the moment you are in. Search for self-compassion meditations such as “loving-kindness” and mindfulness.
- Delve into a book about identifying and managing emotions based on your unique history and experiences.
Check in on a group you feel safest with.
- Share your stories of hardship, and reframe how that has strengthened you as a person and brought you to where you are on your lifelong journey. Find a way to host these conversations so everyone who feels comfortable can share.
- Share your coping strategies for releasing shame. Have each member of the group share at least one strategy and reflect on how each of you can adopt the strategies that speak to your heart.
- Organize a “joy outing.” What brings you and your community joy? Lean into that and consider free and low-cost options. For example, go out dancing, do karaoke at someone’s home, cook together, or go to free museum nights.
Closing Reflection
Career disruption is not a personal failure, even when it feels deeply personal. It’s common to internalize fear, grief, anger or imposter syndrome, especially for those from marginalized communities or whose work is central to their identity and survival. In times of instability, collective care addresses both practical needs and emotional realities, transforming isolation into connection and career transition into a shared moment of reflection, strategy and care.
About the authors: Bianca Tonantzin Zamora (she/her), M.S., is a recognized facilitator specializing in culturally responsive leadership, employee experience and organizational transformation, and Shaila Kotadia, Ph.D., is the director of employee experience and community impact at Stanford University School of Medicine.
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