An Experiment in Abolitionist Practice and Collective Care

By Liz Kovarsky

There’s a question I kept returning to long before Electric Cottage Collective existed:

What would it look like to build spaces where care doesn’t require self-erasure?

ECC was founded in the autumn of 2024 out of a belief that abolition is inherently creative work. Not only the work of dismantling harmful systems, but the work of imagining and building new ways of being together—ways that don’t reproduce the same harm in softer forms. As an abolitionist social worker, I understand my work as staying curious about how to build without reproducing the very problems we aim to dismantle.

This is a project about that second part.

The conditions we’re living in

The COVID-19 pandemic made something impossible to ignore: how isolated, disconnected, and exhausted so many of us already were.

As work, care, and life moved further into digital and remote spaces, something else eroded alongside it—shared rooms, informal rituals, and the everyday relationships that quietly sustain us. In their place, many of us found increasing loneliness, burnout, and a kind of disembodiment that was hard to name but easy to feel.

I started to feel a longing for spaces that weren’t oriented around output or productivity. Spaces where people could gather with intention—not just to produce, but to connect, create, rest, and exist alongside one another without extraction.

What social work taught me (and what it couldn’t hold)

My path through traditional social work settings made these tensions even sharper.

I experienced firsthand how many systems that claim to support well-being do not actually extend that care to workers within them. In one particularly difficult role, I encountered moral injury—being asked to act in ways that conflicted with both my personal ethics and the core values of social work itself.

I left that experience depleted: physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

Even as I moved through different roles afterward, I kept running into the same contradiction. Social workers are tasked with “enhancing human well-being and helping meet the basic needs of all people,” yet the conditions of the work often exclude workers themselves from those basic needs.

This isn’t just a workplace issue. It reflects a deeper cultural logic—one that can quietly reinforce saviorism, especially white saviorism, by encouraging care for others without reflection on burnout, power, extraction, or disconnection.

At a certain point, I could no longer participate in a version of care that required this type of sacrifice as its foundation.

What ECC is trying to practice instead

Electric Cottage Collective emerged as an experiment in practicing social work differently.

It is not a rejection of social work’s values, but a relocation of them.

Here, I still hold close the core commitments of the field—service, social justice, dignity and worth of the person, the importance of human relationships, integrity, and competence—but I try to practice them in a different context. One centered on collective care, creativity, embodiment, and community rather than institutional depletion.

A space for experimentation, not answers

ECC is not a solution to capitalism, racism, isolation, or systemic harm.

It is something smaller, and in some ways more honest than that: a space for experimentation.

A kind of test kitchen for people trying to live, work, create, and connect differently. A place where we can practice more sustainable, relational, and liberatory ways of being together—without pretending we already know exactly what those should look like.

At its heart, ECC asks a simple question:

What becomes possible when care is no longer something we extract from ourselves, but something we practice with one another?