The central objective of the CARE² project was to structurally investigate and alleviate the precarious working conditions of care and social workers by asking the guiding question: "Who cares for those who care?" Specifically, the project aimed to achieve three interconnected goals. First, we sought to deploy Theatre of the Oppressed to make invisible workplace conflicts, role dynamics, and burnout factors visually tangible, fostering critical dialogue and collaborative problem-solving among participants. Second, the project aimed to build a sustainable, transnational support network linking adult educators, frontline social and care workers, and care organizations across Austria, Germany, and Ireland. This network was designed to facilitate international knowledge exchange and mutual learning regarding common structural struggles. Third, we aimed to develop and compile sustainable educational resources—principally a digital playbook—to equip adult educators and care professionals with highly practical tools for ongoing team supervision, self- and collective care, and localized conflict resolution across European contexts.
The CARE² project was initiated to address severe systemic crises within the European social assistance, welfare, and healthcare sectors. Frontline social and care workers face unprecedented structural strain, which manifest daily as high rates of burnout, severe emotional exhaustion, internal team conflicts, and isolating power dynamics. Despite the essential role care workers play in sustaining civil society, their professions remain structurally undervalued and under-resourced. Traditional institutional support systems frequently fail to offer accessible spaces for open reflection or constructive crisis management. To tackle these deep emotional and structural roots of precarious care work, our partnership recognized an urgent need for creative, participatory, and non-formal educational interventions. By utilizing Theatre of the Oppressed methodologies, we implemented for this project to transform workplace struggles into manageable collective discussions, empowering frontline care and social workers to co-create grassroots mechanisms for resilience.