The Circle of Care
Degrees of participation in your wellbeing
Care: the process of protecting someone or something and providing what that person or thing needs. "Care." Cambridge Dictionary, dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/care. Accessed 17 Sept. 2026.
Many relationship understandings have associated images that define and organize them. For example, many of us quickly associate the word “monogamy” with some version of a nuclear family household; “polyamory” with partner constellations or polycules; and family, community, or relationship anarchy with our own unique experiences. How can interamory accommodate all of these variations within a single image?
The solution presents itself if we take the project of care seriously. I have found that the diversity of stories comprising this project’s research can be accurately described under the lens of “communities of practice” (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998), which lets us model any social endeavour by looking at levels of involvement among participants. If we take care as a social project, its organizing image becomes a circle. You stand at the center of the circle as the project's site of care, and the people who care for you stand within the circle at varying distances from you. The people who do not provide care in your life are outside of the circle.
The idea for a circle of care is not a new concept, although its definition varies with the context of its use (Rodrigues, 2022; Ministry of Child and Family Development, 2026; Doctors of BC et al., 2016). Related concepts also exist in disability justice literature (e.g. care webs, Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018) and transformative justice literature (e.g. pods, Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, 2016). Across all of these iterations in their specific fields, the circle of care can be interpreted with a consistent general understanding: the people in your circle are the ones who know you, support you, and have your trust.
In the communities of practice literature, some theorists identify three distinguishable levels of involvement as core, active, and peripheral participants (Wenger, McDermott & Snyder, 2002). But in practical conversation, two more degrees of participation are descriptively useful: close and casual. To test these terms yourself, consider the descriptions in the image below and try the tool linked at the bottom of the page.
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