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.