This week, Women’s Foundation California is slowing down.
We’re not all stepping away—but we are all making space. Each year, we create a Summer Pause: a collective agreement to hold no internal meetings and to loosen the grip of urgency (July 28th-August 1st). It’s an invitation to take PTO, or simply to move through the week with more intention and spaciousness. However we choose to show up, the point is the pause itself—to restore, to reflect, to remember we are not machines.
We believe rest is not a luxury. It’s a rhythm. A refusal. A return. It reminds us that we are not defined by what we produce. We are whole, creative, complex beings who need time to breathe, to dream, to loosen our grip on urgency.
We hold rest as a form of radical care. Not the kind sold in self-care ads, but the kind that says: our survival matters. Our healing matters. Our joy—especially for people of the global majority, queer and trans people, undocumented communities, and working-class folks—is not frivolous. It’s necessary.
Right now, our communities are navigating overlapping crises: criminalization, displacement, authoritarian violence, police brutality, forced removals, and attacks on bodily autonomy and gender expression. In this reality, rest is more than personal. It’s political. A way to push back against systems that try to exhaust us, silence us, and disappear us.
We know rest isn’t always within reach.
For caregivers, for low-wage workers, for undocumented people and those surviving under the weight of capitalism—rest can feel like a far-off dream.
That’s why we name it not just as a practice, but as a personal act of reclamation.
A collective call for a world where care isn’t earned, it’s honored.
We rest to stay rooted for the long haul. We rest because our movements are made of people, not programs. And we invite you to do the same. Even a small moment—a breath, a shared meal, a walk with no destination—can be a way back to yourself. A glimpse of the future we’re building together.
Let’s keep caring for ourselves and one another like our liberation depends on it. Because it does.