Our Core Values are our shared beliefs that guide our behavior and decision-making as a Collective, fostering alignment, unity, and accountability.
How Our Values Guide Our Work
Our values are not just words—they shape our decisions, relationships, and outcomes. They guide us to:
- Build trust and collaboration across our differences by acting with integrity, transparency, respect and humility.
- Center fairness and inclusion through being mindful of equity, justice, and inclusivity in all processes.
- Empower people and communities by organizing and advocating for systems that enable self-determination, freedom, and well-being.
- Lead with empathy and authenticity by demonstrating vulnerability, humility, compassion and truth-telling.
- Drive collective impact and sustainability by ensuring shared responsibility, shared leadership and accountability to one another and communities impacted by systems of oppression.
- Honor the roots of mutual aid in social movements by upholding proletariat piety, making political education a cornerstone of all of our actions and staying true to the mission of mutual aid.
Our Core Values with Examples
Community
We unite as a collective, fostering belonging and shared purpose across our differences to create sustainable and resilient communities and build collective power to enact change.
Example: Coming together to organize a food system for our immigrant brothers and sisters on the MS Gulf Coast who have been impacted by ICE raids to ensure they have access to healthy foods and other necessities without having to put themselves in harm’s way.
Equity
We center equity and intersectionality, ensuring our decisions and actions are centering those most impacted by systems of oppression.
Example: Providing direct mutual aid to trans people who lack access to gender-affirming healthcare so they can travel across state lines to obtain the care they need.
Transparency
We lead with openness and honesty, building trust through clear and authentic communication.
Example: Openly sharing access to all communications channels, meetings, meeting notes, documents and decision-making processes with all Collective members.
Inclusivity
We celebrate diversity and create spaces where every voice is heard and valued.
Example: Utilizing consensus-based decision-making to ensure sure all voices are heard in decision-making processes and all Collective members have the opportunity to shape the outcome of these processes.
Proletariat Piety
We honor humility and working class solidarity, uplifting the dignity and strength of the working class and supporting the organizing of working class power.
Example: Supporting cooperative economics, fair wages, workers’ rights to unionize and grassroots labor and working class liberation movements globally.
Vulnerability
We embrace courage in sharing our truths, cultivating trust and deep human connection.
Example: Openly sharing our challenges and lessons learned during team debriefs and gatherings.
Accountability
We own our actions and commitments, standing firm in responsibility and integrity.
Example: Setting target dates for action items and holding ourselves accountable to them, understanding that our individual commitments to our comrades to moving this work forward builds and maintains trust, and ultimately the sustainability and success of our movement.
Authenticity
We live and lead with sincerity, staying true to our values.
Example: Creating movement spaces that are safe for authentic self-expression and truth-telling, understanding that these are foundations for individual and societal freedom and transformation.
Compassion
We act with empathy and care, striving to ease burdens and uplift others.
Example: Striving to organize with a trauma-informed approach, understanding that many, if not all of us, and our communities are survivors of trauma, and we must be gentle and patient with each other while struggling together to dismantle systems of oppression.
Cooperation
We join forces with respect and unity, achieving more together than alone.
Example: Our Collective’s membership includes numerous grassroots organizations from across the MS Gulf Coast and individual residents of the Gulf Coast, each understanding that our Collective power to care for and defend one another is greater than any one of us alone.
Integrity
We uphold unwavering principles, ensuring honesty and ethical action in all we do.
Example: Refusing to align ourselves with other organizations, groups, agendas or ideologies that do not share our core principles.
Justice
We struggle for fairness and equality, creating systems that protect and empower all people.
Example: Advocating for the dissolution of ICE in addition to organizing community ICE Watches because we know there can be no justice for immigrants or anyone else as long as our nation funds and enables a state-sanctioned racist para-military organization to utilize violence, manipulation and brutality against our Black and Brown immigrant neighbors.
Self-Determination
We believe individuals and communities should have the power to shape their own identities and destinies and pursue their aspirations.
Example: Supporting the organizing of the poor, predominantly Black community of Gloster, Mississippi in being self-determined by demanding the shut down of the harmful polluting biomass industry in its community so they can live in a community with clean air and water.
Freedom
We safeguard the right to think, speak, and act without constraint, nurturing creativity and autonomy.
Example: Organizing resistance to a proposed ban of LGBTQ+ authored and themed books from Biloxi Public Libraries because we know freedom of thought, speech and expression is a universal human right.
Respect
We honor the dignity and worth of every person, fostering mutual understanding and trust.
Example: Organizing a teach-in alongside our unhoused neighbors in Biloxi to educate our communities about the roots causes of homelessness on the MS Gulf Coast and uplift the dignity and worth of our neighbors experiencing homelessness.
Well-being
We believe in holistic health and balance, enabling people to flourish in mind, body, and spirit.
Example: Hosting a free and inclusive Community Yoga class once a month, creating an accessible space for community members to practice mindfulness, movement and breathing in a safe environment.
Truth
We seek and uphold honesty, clarity, and authenticity as the foundation of all we do.
Example: Practicing use of clear and accurate language in describing systems of oppression and their impacts on our communities, avoiding use of the oppressor’s propaganda and hypocrisy.