Care as Organisational Infrastructure
Global Crisis, Institutional Power, and the Reproduction of Harm
An emerging collaborative research inquiry | 2026–ongoing
What happens when care moves beyond individual relationships and organisational programmes to become part of the structures, decisions, and institutional arrangements that sustain collective work?
Developed through a collaboration between The Substratum Initiative and The Better Org, this inquiry examines care not simply as a value or practice, but as organisational infrastructure: something that shapes how resources are distributed, responsibilities are held, decisions are made, and institutional power is exercised.
The research was first presented by Uma Mishra-Newbery and Tina Ajuonuma at the Interdisciplinary Social Sciences Conference in Galway, Ireland, in July 2026.
Marking The Substratum Initiative’s first academic research offering, the presentation opens a longer process of inquiry, writing and dialogue across practitioner and academic spaces. We hope to continue developing, questioning, and sharing this contribution as the work evolves.
The Inquiry: Why Care as Infrastructure
Care is increasingly recognised as essential to sustaining people, organisations and movements working towards social change. Yet the ways care is understood, organised and institutionalised remain deeply contested.
Within organisations, care is often approached through individual practices of support or discrete programmes intended to promote wellbeing. While these approaches matter, they can leave the underlying structures that shape people's experiences of work, responsibility, power and harm largely unexamined.
Three Dimensions of Care
Our inquiry considers care across three interconnected dimensions:
Care as Practice - The everyday relational work of listening, accompaniment, conflict navigation, mutual support and attending to one another's needs.
Care as Programme - Formalised initiatives such as wellbeing activities, coaching, retreats, stipends and other forms of structured support.
Care as Infrastructure - The organisational arrangements through which care is enabled, constrained or distributed, including governance, policies, resource allocation, accountability, decision-making and institutional design.
These dimensions and the distinctions between them matter because care does not become transformative simply by being named, valued or institutionalised. Organisations can introduce care programmes while leaving harmful working conditions intact. Organisations can shift care responsibilities onto individuals without corresponding changes to resources or power. And institutional commitments to care can sometimes legitimise existing arrangements rather than challenge them.
By examining care as organisational infrastructure, we examine the conditions under which care sustains collective work, and the conditions under which it may reproduce the very inequalities, exclusions, and harms it seeks to address.
The Questions We Are Holding
Our inquiry begins with a tension: care is necessary to sustain collective work, yet the ways it is institutionalised can reproduce the very conditions of harm it seeks to address.
Rather than assuming that more care programmes necessarily produce more caring organisations, we examine the organisational and institutional conditions through which care operates.
Some of the questions guiding this work include:
Who carries the responsibility for care?
How is care labour distributed, recognised and resourced? When does responsibility shift from institutions onto individuals, particularly those already carrying disproportionate burdens?
What happens when care becomes institutionalised?
Can formal commitments to care transform organisational structures, or can they also legitimise existing power arrangements, contain conflict and leave underlying conditions unchanged?
Whose needs and experiences define care?
Who has the authority to determine what care looks like, whose knowledge informs its design, and whose experiences of harm or exclusion are recognised?
What would it mean to organise care differently?
How might governance, resource allocation, accountability and organisational design enable care to become a shared institutional responsibility rather than an individual obligation?
How does power shape the organisation and experience of
How do intersecting structures of power and inequality (including race, gender, class, colonial histories, and institutional hierarchies) shape whose needs are prioritised, whose labour is expected, and whose experiences of care or harm are recognised? How do funding relationships, governance arrangements, and organisational authority reproduce or challenge these dynamics?
These questions are not offered as settled conclusions. They form part of an evolving research and practice-based inquiry into the relationship between care, organisational infrastructure and institutional power.
Research, Publications & Contributions
This inquiry began its public journey in July 2026, when The Substratum Initiative and The Better Org brought their collaborative research to the Interdisciplinary Social Sciences Conference in Galway, Ireland.
The presentation marked an important milestone in our efforts to bring organisational practice, movement experience and critical scholarship into conversation. It also opened a longer process of research, writing and dialogue that we hope will contribute to both academic and practitioner spaces.
The July presentation is a starting point rather than a completed research programme. As we develop the academic paper, we are deepening the inquiry’s explicit analysis of power, including how structural inequalities, institutional authority and funding relationships shape the organisation of care and the reproduction of harm.
We are also exploring opportunities to contribute practitioner-facing articles, reflections and dialogue across movement, philanthropic and academic spaces.
As these contributions develop and are published, we will share them here.
First Research Presentation | July 2026
Care as Organisational Infrastructure: Global Crisis, Institutional Power, and the Reproduction of Harm
Uma Mishra-Newbery and Tina Ajuonuma
Interdisciplinary Social Sciences Conference | Galway, Ireland | July 2026
Our first public presentation examines how care operates through organisational practices, programmes and institutional structures, and how the institutionalisation of care can both sustain collective work and reproduce existing relations of power and harm.
From Research to Praxis
This inquiry is rooted in a shared commitment between The Substratum Initiative and The Better Org to examine how organisational structures shape the possibilities and limitations of care. Our collaboration brings practitioner experience into dialogue with critical scholarship, recognising that the knowledge generated through organisational practice is essential to understanding how institutional power operates and how different arrangements might become possible.
For Substratum, this research also contributes to our wider experimentation with youth-led movements and the organisational infrastructure that sustains collective action.
Although care is often understood primarily through relationships, our Five Domains of Organisational Infrastructure framework invites us to examine how care operates across resource, operational, governance, knowledge and relational arrangements. We see this work as an ongoing conversation between research and practice: one that will continue to evolve through writing, critical reflection, collaboration and the questions emerging from our broader inquiry.