ABOUT
Our Values
MISSION
Our Mission is to Build Sustainable Change.
We do so by supporting regions to further their collaborative journey for racial and economic equity, and by centering our most marginalized populations as we advance towards the beloved community.
VISION
Our Vision is The Beloved Community.
Dr. King defined the beloved community as “a global vision in which all people can share in the wealth of the earth - a world where racism and all forms of discrimination, bigotry, and prejudice will be replaced by an all-inclusive spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood.”
When we are practicing the beloved community, we center love for humanity. Love as accountability. Love as justice. Love as community. Love as belonging.
HISTORY
Why Beloved Community?
Learn more about the history, legacy, and lives of the revolutionaries who laid the ground work for what we do today.
“Our goal is to create a beloved community and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives.”
- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1966)
OUR VALUES
Our Values guide us in everything we do. We are building beloved community, not only through our work, but through
the way we do our work. These five core values are more than just words, as we engage with these convictions as a
call for actionable love.
PEOPLE CHANGE SYSTEMS
We believe that people change systems. People are the greatest unit of change. When people embrace shared values,
they maintain systems that amplify those values. Everyone has an obligation to make personally relevant change, and when our leaders change, they accelerate systemic change for the organizations that they lead. The default systems in
our country are designed to segregate.
We believe that by questioning and challenging the default, we can dismantle it and build equitable systems in its place.
BLACK LIVES MATTER
Today, and always, Beloved Community honors and centers our Black communities. What we talk about in our sessions is not just academic jargon, or hot topics for our partners to think about and discuss. These topics of race, systems of oppression, and marginalization have real, life and death consequences for our Black communities. We say centering Black lives because we believe that the root of White supremacy is anti-blackness specifically. We believe it is crucial that we continuously interrogate and address the ways that biases, racism, white supremacy, and intersectionality impact our decisions and the ways that
our organizations operate. We also require ourselves and the organizations that
we work with to center Black joy, Black futures, and Black contributions to our history, institutions, and systems.
CREATE WITH ABUNDANCE
We deeply believe that there is
enough for everyone. It is our duty to
make space, to co-create, and to imagine abundant possibilities in ourselves and
our communities. It is our time to build
just futures and to do so from a
place of abundance.
CENTER JOY & JUSTICE
We believe that joy must be part
of the revolution. We insert levity where appropriate through art, song, and personal testimony—all while still maintaining our commitment to justice for those communities who experience
the most harm.
INTERROGATE NEUTRALITY
All of the systems we currently
experience were built with someone’s biased perspective. We do not believe that any system, process, or law is neutral. We consistently ask “Who were these policies and practices designed to benefit, and who were they designed to marginalize?”