On 10 November 2026 Laura Vidal published a post on “Who Cares for Those Who Care?”Laura Vidal is a Venezuelan researcher in freedom of expression, a digital rights advocate, and an intercultural communication expert:
What follows draws on a conversation with Vita Activa’s founder, Lu Ortiz, and on the organization’s own record of its work: six years of annual reports and blog posts tracing how one helpline grew into a wider argument about care.
The Beginnings
Vita Activa’s actual origin predates Vita Activa itself. Around 2018, Ortiz and researcher Estrella Soria ran Hacks de Vida, a transcontinental study that spoke with feminist and cyberfeminist organizations across Latin America. The findings were consistent everywhere: this work got done without pay, without training, in whatever free time was left—nights, early mornings, vacations. Care, disproportionately carried by women, by people from the global south, by racialized people already navigating complex lives, had been normalized as something owed for free. Ortiz has since described it as the moment she understood the task ahead: dignify the work, pay for it, professionalize it, and bring people together to do it collectively. Hacks de Vida, in her words, is “the mother of Vita.”
Vita Activa itself launched in 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, in what its team calls a year defined by economic, political, and social uncertainty—“un año marcado por ese sentimiento de desazón.” Tejiendo Fuerza, its first initiative, opened confidential, anonymous, community spaces for feminist activists, cyberfeminists, journalists, and freedom of expression defenders in Argentina, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia, Ecuador, and Bolivia. The following year confirmed the crisis wasn’t only medical. The organization notes that in 2021 was defined by mental health cases, the effects of lockdown, isolation, and the loss of work, school, and social life.
By 2022, one of Vita Activa’s own users had put language to the question underlying all of it: quiénes cuidan a las que cuidan, “who cares for those who care?” She wrote that activists, journalists, and human rights defenders put their bodies on the line in feminist and intersectional struggle every single day. Meeting Vita Activa felt like recognizing a companion because in an environment this hostile, we have to find each other to persist. The answer the community built for itself was collective, not delivered from outside: nos cuidamos entre nosotras y nosotres, “we care for each other.” It’s why Persistir y Resurgir “Persist and Resist,” carries a political meaning in the plural. By scale, this meant more than 300 people were reached daily through community circles that year.
Growth That Didn’t Outgrow the Collective
Without losing its communal core, what began as a focused helpline grew from the 6 original countries in 2020 to 20 by 2023—with the largest share of cases coming from Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, and El Salvador. The expansion wasn’t only geographic; it was a shift from listening to producing knowledge that could travel on its own. In 2024, the organization launched its first podcast, VitaCast, and produced the Manual de Primeros Auxilios Psicológicos y Digitales, the product of 10 months of free training offered in English, Spanish, and Arabic. That same instinct carried the work beyond its founding region entirely: in late 2023, Vita Activa began offering psychological and digital first aid training to women and LGBTQ+ people, journalists, and activists in the Middle East. This was not aid moving in one direction, but a dialogue between communities of the global majority navigating comparable pressures.
Who was actually arriving, and why, became clearest in the organization’s 2023 Germinar report, which stated that the correspondents were overwhelmingly cisgender women (91.2%), 40% of them journalists, just over half under 30 — reaching out over chronic exhaustion, online harassment, nonconsensual sharing of intimate images, and digital surveillance.
Rest as a Political Practice
Vita Activa closed out 2025 with an idea that folds its philosophy into a single practice: caring for others also means learning to rest. Vita’s executive director was inspired by a line from US poet Tricia Hersey, “Dreaming is our work, rest is the goal.” With that purpose in mind, she initiated Media Fest for team. Thirteen people joined from around the world for a deliberately unhurried day built around a collective collage exercise. Its centerpiece was, quite deliberately, an exercise in producing nothing at all: a guided 30-minute nap, described internally as a profoundly political act of resistance. What surfaced afterward the need for a shared bank of resources, the recommitment to circles, rest, tenderness, the body—and that confirmed something the team had been learning: collective care isn’t peripheral to this work. It’s what makes the work possible to sustain.
If there’s one thing this history argues for, it is care in more than one direction. It is the idea that those who care are cared for and that those who care for the carers are cared for too. That we keep widening the networks, the tools, and the spaces built for this, until our movements build care into their structure rather than reaching for it only after the damage is done.
If you or anyone you know need help, you can contact vita-activa.org.
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