EmpowR Accountability
Transformative Justice & Emergent Strategy
Empowerment comes from within our own wholeness and in our ability to have access to the resources, relationships, support systems, and community in order to be in our wholeness. We are individual human beings and our lives are interdependent with each other and Mama Earth.
We, as human beings, are a part of the cycles of nature. We are alive to be together and to share our love, our gifts, our magic…and to have those gifts be received…in all of the expressions of our different identities.
Paths of personal empowerment to be in our wholeness–the beauty, the mess, and everything in between–are fractals of what leads to transformation. We are microcosms in the macrocosm. We are threads of mycelium in the network of the human web of relationship and communication.
Transformative justice is emergence into building the cultural conditions where anyone who has been historically excluded, marginalized, or oppressed is able to be empowered.
The arc of personal, communal, and collective healing is an evolution of our consciousness–a transformation that calls for building the capacity to embody radical empathy, emotional intelligence, trauma responsiveness, collective liberation, and dignity for humanity and all beings of Mama Earth.
As the old paradigm crumbles and we shift away from the toxicity of dominant systems, may we find faith together to build and emerge into just visions for New Earth–even if we likely will not see the impacts we are working towards in this lifetime. May we build trust together that our evolution towards belonging are seeds we are planting in the soil and may our grief water them with life for the future.
Our mission, work, and culture is accountable to:
Transformative Justice:
- transform ourselves to transform the world (Grace Lee Boggs);
- practices that go all the way to the root cause of the problem and generate solutions and healing there, such that the conditions that create injustice are transformed (adrienne maree brown);
- transform the conditions that enable harm, while facilitating repair for the harm by cultivating accountability, healing, resilience and safety for all (Mia Mingus);
- heal yourself to heal the world (you must be the change you want to see in the world – Mahatma Gandhi)
- approach to conversations, practices, and shared learning that generate healing and solutions at the root of complex issues to transform the conditions that cause personal and cultural harm, suffering, and injustice (EmpowR accountability language);
Emergent Strategy (adrienne maree brown):
- approaching change through relatively small, repetitive interactions to build more complex patterns and systems
- collaboration rooted in love and humility that relies on the strength of relationships for adaptability
- intentionally changing in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for
Acknowledgement of the Work We Move Forward
Guides, teachers, wisdom, and works who inspire our vision and whose visions we move forward:
- adrienne maree brown: Emergent Strategy, Holding Change, We Will Not Cancel Us and her teachers including Grace Lee Boggs, Mia Mingus, and Octavia Butler
- Circle practice with guidance from The Circle Way
- Cultural somatics and somatic abolitionism practice with Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands
- Indigenous wisdom from Braiding Sweetgrass, Gathering Moss and essays by Robin Wall Kimmerer; Sacred Instructions by Sherri Mitchell (She Who Brings the Light), and teachings of Pat McCabe (Woman Stands Shining)
- Personal lineage from all of our kin including our body, plant, animal, and soul ancestors; Spirit/God/Universe/Multiverse; Pagan deities from our animist lineages, and our awakening intuition, consciousness evolution, and personal accountability, healing, and transformation work
- Racial justice mobilization with Showing Up for Racial Justice, Divorcing White Supremacy Culture; and unlearning Me and White Supremacy by Layla F Saad
- Wisdom of Bell Hooks, Heather McGhee, Jean Houston, Joanna Macy, Norma Wong, Sonya Renee Taylor, Tara Brach