Self Care Sunday’s is one of the few podcasts on air that centers communities of color and their access to sustainable, non-commercialized self-care. Our team is led by two women of color: host Aditi Juneja and producer Jess Talwar, both Indian-Americans. Aditi created Self Care Sundays as a feminist practice based on the ideas of Audre Lorde, an American writer, feminist and civil rights activist who stated, “We can’t pour from an empty cup.”

In Season 1, we started with social justice roots as we interviewed activists and discussed how they combated burnout during unstable political climates. Our inspiration for Season 2 came from our conversation with Alice Wong of the Disability Visibility Project. As she discussed the power of saying “no” and social media boundaries, we decided to explore how one concretely habitualizes self-care practices. The idea fueling this podcast is that our work as activists cannot end at the end of this Administration. We need to remain vigilant and healthy beyond 2020, 2024, and so forth to continue empowering marginalized groups.

Our creative vision is informed by intersectionality as we seek to elevate the voices of guests and listeners who exist at the intersection of marginalized identities including race, gender, disability, and sexual orientation. We deliberately choose guests from all walks of life for two reasons. First, we hope that the unique practices discussed by our guests can be broadened and applicable to the lives of our diverse listening base. Second, we hope to “introduce” listeners to folks they otherwise might not have the chance to know, as was the case with our episode with Paralympian Andrew Johnson, former sex worker Kaytlin Bailey, or entrepreneur Carolina Contreras. Blind athletes exist. Sex workers exist. Afro-Latinx people exist. We want to uplift their stories while also talking about a topic unfortunately considered “selfish” or “bougie” by some.

What our grantee is saying: "The whole purpose of Self Care Sundays is to explore sustainable, non-commercialized self-care for folks within communities of color that are juggling competing obligations. Discussions of self-care can get clouded quickly with the ideas of face masks and bath bombs, and we’re here to say there’s more to it than that. If we’re talking about making the practice of self-care accessible to more people, we need to make the content itself literally accessible to all people! That’s where this grant is going - to a transcription service to transcribe two seasons worth of episodes."