Monday, May 16, 2011

Values and Guiding Questions

 
 

Sent to you by moya via Google Reader:

 
 


In March, Stacey and I had an in-home weekend retreat with each other.  We talked vision, strategy, capacity, and support for ourselves and our home.  We also wrote out our values for our relationship and home.  These are things that are important to us, that we wanted to consciously remember, build and cultivate. 

We wrote out some guiding principles/questions for our work.  Whenever anything new comes across our desks/email (or when we are thinking of work we want to create), we run it by these questions first, so we can be intentional about staying focused and prioritize the work we want to do. If it matches up with majority, then we try and do it, if not, then we don't.  it is very useful. 

We put them up in our kitchen, so that we would see them everyday and they wouldn't be random documents filed away in computer folders.  They have become part of our lives and everyone who comes into our home takes them in, sometimes asking questions.  They are wonderful constant reminders. 

We wanted to share these with you, since they are literally a part of our home and are part of To the Other Side of Dreaming.  They are living documents, constantly being revisited and added to.  We will probably re-do them later this year, so they will always be relevant and reflective of where we are.  We offer them and hope they might be useful to you.

GUIDING PRINCIPLES:

  • Does it concretely build our local communities? Family? Home?
  • Does it build leadership of queer disabled people of color and disabled people of color?
  • Does it build capacity of comrades of color?
  • Does it support individual and collective transformation?
  • Does it prioritize safety and space for queer disabled people of color and disabled people of color?
  • Does it support women of color and people of color not being affraid to love other women of color and people of color?  Does it support us de-centering and not getting distracted by whiteness?
  • Does it support us being gentle and accountable when we use our survival strategies with each other?
  • Does it feed and grow us?
  • Does it build community safety, access, resiliency and accountability?
  • Does it share the disability justice framework with others?
  • Does it respect our home and relationship?
  • Does it support our values?

VALUES:

  • Home, family and community.
  • kindness and tenderness.  Having an open heart.  How we treat each other.  Holding a loving, horizontal line.
  • Bringing our best selves.
  • Fierce and direct and loving communication.
  • courage and risk for more genuine and whole relationships with ourselves and others, even at the expense of comfort.
  • interdependency and taking care of each other.
  • we value where we come from.
  • documenting, storytelling and art.
  • breathing, breath, spirit, resiliency.
  • dreaming, imagination and visioning.
  • resistance to current systems and building alternatives.
  • building up and out, instead of down and in (fighting cliques and elitism).
  • connection, intimacy and desire.
  • doing what we didn't think was possible!
  • intention, purpose, legacy, time, individual and collective sustainability.
  • love, sex, good food, laughter.
  • being treated well!  Not letting ourselves get treated like shit.
  • Truth, honesty and healing.
  • making mistakes and learning from them.
  • using our resources responsibly.

pink list of values over a grean and blue list of guiding principles on two pieces of flip chart paper hung one on top of the other on the wall.  pink list of values on flip chart paper  green and blue list of guiding principles on white flip chart paper


 
 

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