Two years ago, I blogged about ways that building meeting agreements can support equity and inclusion. As organizations have become more diverse, meeting agreements are often revealed to be rooted in unhelpful assumptions about what voices, cultures and assumptions are normative.
My current practice is to tell participants what I, as the group facilitator, need from them in order to fill my role, and to ask if there are additional behaviors they need from each other. I often prime that conversation with the following invitations for ethical community care.
Lightly adapted from the work of Sandra Cisneros and the Macondo Writers’ Compassionate Code of Conduct, these are invitations to show up inclusively rather than rules to be enforced. They foreground ethical behavior over obedience, and are a guide to building relationships of mutual accountability. Most important, these invitations assume the survival wisdom, varied experiences, and cultural expressions of people of color are central to the group’s success. They explicitly invite us to counter white cultural norms.
12 Invitations for Ethical Community Care
Behave toward each other with kindness.
Be our most generous selves.
Respect and recognize the fullness of each other.
Point to what is beautiful, moving, and well-done.
Recognize our persistence, skepticism, and willingness to confront others as valuable survival skills.
Be creative.
Witness marginalization, and treat each other better than that.
Learn from our differences, so that we do not shut down an unrecognized part of ourselves.
Engage in respectful conflict openly, so that we may grow and learn together.
Declare ourselves present without silencing anyone else.
Sustain dialogue; release the expectation to have the last word, or to persuade others of the rightness of our opinion.
Invite wonder, humility, and awe.
