About Us > Mission & Philosophy
Our philosophy
We believe that effective social justice work requires:
Our work integrates these four core areas throughout the services we provide.
- shared analysis about structural oppression and dominance,
- personal awareness of how we each individually participate in these structures,
- shared practices for healing trauma from oppression,
- building accountability for individual and structural harm caused by dominance.
Our work integrates these four core areas throughout the services we provide.
guiding principles
Impact of Trauma
- Individual, structural, and state-based trauma impacts people, communities, and organizations in ways that compromise healing and justice. We recognize the complexity of trauma and its many manifestations in our lives.
- The root causes of much of our hurt and trauma is the experience of multi-generational exploitation and oppression. We ground our work in historical perspectives of trauma.
- Community-based experiential learning help us reduce the impact of trauma and cultivate wellness. We build connections with each other and practice learning in new ways, together.
- Lived experiences enrich our understanding and development. We center personal histories and narratives in our work.
- Diversity strengthens our communities, so our work must center what has been pushed to the margins. We design our work to engage people of diverse identities, backgrounds, and learning styles.
- Understanding the ways in which we all hold intersecting social identities that are privileged and oppressed helps us to better engage with ourselves and the world we live in. We honor the complexity of our identities and how social context influences our experiences of power.
- Approaching power from an intersectional perspective reduces individual feelings of helplessness. We encourage a dynamic understanding of power that supports adaptive strategies for social justice.
- Healing from oppression requires space for creativity, play, laughter, expansive imagination, and love. We invite participants to experience their liberated selves in our work.
- All people deserve spaces where their full humanity and wholeness is recognized and welcomed. We strive to create spaces that invite wholeness.
- In order to sustain our fight against systems of oppression we must take care of ourselves individually and within community: "Caring for [ourselves] is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare," Audre Lorde
- It is necessary to work for social change in the service of justice. We must begin now.