Mission
Creating solidarity and resilience in Lane County through crisis and beyond by developing connections and providing support from neighbor to neighbor. We are a grassroots alternative to top-down institutions and work to normalize everyday, radical steps towards collective liberation.
Principles
Expansive Definition of Community/Neighbor
- Everyone is included, everyone has a place. Everyone has a neighbor.
- We acknowledge that neighbors are tied together through place and circumstance.
- Includes housed and unhoused neighbors.
- Includes BIPOC, rural communities, and other neighbors that have been marginalized by traditional power structures.
- Building relationships across artificial barriers, such as race, gender, and class.
- Acknowledgement that we are human residents in a natural world, and that all living things are our neighbors.
Recognizing current and historically oppressive systems and centering BIPOC needs
- Building a network that seeks to come out of the injustice that has caused the crises we face.
- Collective liberation is only achieved when the oppressed are free.
Support based on mutual trust
- Trust neighbors to know what they need and work to give support as we can.
- Meeting people as they are today – “make that kind of society where it is easier for people to be good” (Peter Maurin).
Horizontal/Non-hierarchical/Leaderful
- LCMA is a network of individuals operating on collective trust.
- We are all capable of making informed decisions for our own self, and contribute in decisions for the group.
- Our varying responsibilities and roles do not influence our individual worth or value.
Multitude of ways to get involved
- Continued learning and self-education.
- Our work is an expression of our collective capacity.
- Value in giving what we can, appreciation for range of talents and skills.
Mutual aid with each other/self care
- Not looking for perfection.
- Slow process, sustainable growth (minimize burnout).
- Balance between labor and care in our personal and collective approach to mutual aid.
- Radical acts of joy, rest, and celebration.
Relationship and connection building
- Material and emotional connection with the people immediately around us.
- Trusting each other so we become trustworthy (adrienne maree brown, paraphrased).
- Meeting people on an individual level, understanding the capacity for collective benefit to ripple out from support of a single person.
Abundance
- Our community has abundance that we can share among each other.
- We don’t need to live in scarcity (taught to us by capitalism).
- We strive for our organizing to also be generative.