Values and Commitments
We do our best to “practice the world we wish to see” (adrienne maree brown): a thriving, abundant world that is safe for everyone. We believe that every moment holds the possibility of an in-breaking of the new realm of peace and freedom God intends, and that we co-create those kindom-becoming moments together. So we endeavor to practice values and commitments, within our collective and with you, that serve to nourish a new world into being. And, we honor that this is a practice of the “already” and the “not yet:” we do this work imperfectly, understanding “mistakes” as opportunities to learn, and grow, and transform.
Values and commitments we practice include:
- Being a Queer-led space that celebrates gender expansiveness and trans & nonbinary people
- Encouraging our abolitionist imaginations
- Engaging transformative justice to address harm
- Honoring our tender bodies and our sexualities and sensualities
- Crafting spaces of hospitality (beginners welcome!), creativity, and joy
- Grounding our analysis and practice in an intersectional approach that centers:
- Disability justice,
- Economic justice,
- Environmental justice,
- Racial justice,
- Decolonization,
- Gender justice,
- Immigrant justice, and
- International solidarity
- Supporting people across geographies, including rural, urban, and suburban
- Deepening our skill for radical, grassroots democracy, in the lineage of Dr. Vincent Harding
- Cultivating care, collectivity, and mutual aid
- Honoring our connection to lineages, ancestors, and histories in all their complexities.
- Rooting our work in Praxis: moving between action and reflection so we are always learning, so we don’t get stuck.
- Finding our shared stake in movements for collective liberation – we do this work for ourselves as much as anybody else.
We also actively reject the Machinery of Death, the Pharaohs of our times, and how they try to tear us apart from one another, ourselves, and the land. We reject their violent imagination that relies on:
- Racism and white supremacy
- Capitalism and colonization
- Patriarchy and misogyny
- Antisemitism
- Islamophobia
- Christian dominance and Christian Zionism
- Policing, prisons, and militarism
- Imperialism, authoritarianism, and fascism
- Homophobia and transphobia
- Criminalization, punishment, and disposability
- Fatphobia and shaming of bodies
- Borders and fear of immigrants
We commit to dismantling the ways the Death Machine’s oppressive systems are embedded in our imaginations, bodies, and practices — knowing and unwinding this is the collective work of a lifetime.