🌺 Mothers, Matriarchs & Memory: Honoring Care as Leadership
This May, as we celebrate Mother’s Day and honor Mental Health Awareness and Asian Pacific American Month, we take a moment to lift up the often-unseen labor of mothers, grandmothers, aunties, caregivers, and matriarchs; especially Black, Indigenous, and immigrant women who carry families, communities, and movements with a strength that is both tender and revolutionary.
Too often, care work is dismissed as background noise. It is the late-night worry, the meal prepped while others sleep, the soft humming during hair braiding, the tireless advocacy for a child, a neighbor, a cause. These everyday acts of love are the blueprint of our communities. At Love Before ALL, we believe that this kind of care is not peripheral to leadership, it is leadership.
The Labor of Love is Leadership
Women have long been strategists, organizers, mediators, educators, and healers. Long before systems offered aid, it was the aunties who kept the pantry stocked for neighbors. It was the abuelas who held the family history and helped guide moral decisions. It was the mamas who spoke truth in church basements and marched in streets for better schools, safer neighborhoods, and basic dignity.
This emotional labor, often invisible and unpaid, has shaped the conditions of our lives and it continues to do so today. Leadership does not always look like a podium or a paycheck. It often looks like a baby on one hip and a plan on the stove. It looks like fierce love, quiet resilience, and generational wisdom passed down through memory and ritual.
Centering Mental Health in Mothering Work
While we celebrate the brilliance of our caregivers, we must also name the weight they carry. The constant caretaking, the mental load of everyone else’s needs, and the lack of structural support can have profound impacts on mental health. Many mothers, especially Black, Indigenous, and immigrant women are experiencing burnout, anxiety, and depression in silence.
At Love Before ALL, we believe that healing-centered leadership acknowledges this reality and prioritizes support, rest, and collective care for our caregivers. We believe that our mothers deserve more than survival. They deserve spaciousness. They deserve joy.
Practical Steps to Honor Care as Leadership
1. Acknowledge Emotional Labor as Expertise
In your organization, name caregiving as a leadership skill.
Invite stories, not just strategies; storytelling builds cultural understanding.
Create space in meetings or programming to honor the unseen contributions of caregivers.
2. Support the Mental Health of Mothers and Caregivers
Partner with culturally responsive mental health providers to offer group therapy, circles, or workshops.
Provide flexible schedules and wellness stipends for family-workers.
Make postpartum and maternal mental health visible and destigmatized.
3. Build Intergenerational Leadership Models
Create programming that includes elders and mothers as facilitators and knowledge-holders.
Host community storytelling or memory-keeping events where women elders can pass down traditions and values.
Elevate care-based leadership alongside other forms of organizing.
4. Seed the Future by Investing in Care Infrastructure
Advocate for universal early childhood education, paid family leave, and maternal health access as part of your organization’s justice agenda.
Educate funders and policymakers on the return on investment of caregiving systems.
Support mutual aid, doulas, community kitchens, and healing networks led by mothers.
People-First Leadership Is Rooted in Care
When we think of those who lead us with love, who hold the line between what is and what could be, it is often the mothers and women in our lives. The ones who remembered our names, packed the snacks, wiped the tears, and told us to dream big even when their own dreams were deferred.
Their care is not a soft skill. It is a survival strategy, a cultural force, and a leadership model we must elevate and invest in.
Let this month be more than a card or a caption. Let it be a recommitment to building systems and communities that honor care as power, and leadership as love in action.
With Gratitude for Every Woman Who Made a Way,
Your Curious Cultural Architect <3
#LoveBeforeALL #CareIsLeadership #PeopleFirst
