Read the blog post “SJF’s New Organizational Values: How We Got Here”
Read the blog post “SJF’s New Organizational Values: How We Got Here”
Check out our blog post on Black Liberation at SJF
SJF supports the liberation of all Black people across the diaspora. We see anti-Blackness as a weapon of white supremacy and are committed to confronting and addressing it within our systems and the world in which we operate. Black liberation is dynamic and expansive, so our commitment to understanding it must be, too. We find power in imagining a world where all Black people are treated with full humanity, protected, and valued without fail. SJF centers Black liberation because we know it to be the root of collective liberation; when all Black people are liberated, everyone is liberated.
What this values looks like in practice at SJF:
Centuries of colonialism across the globe, and settler-colonialism specifically in so-called North America, including the territory SJF serves (currently known as Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming), have severely harmed, exploited, and displaced Indigenous and Native American peoples. Colonialism produces deep power disparities and unjust systems such as capitalism, racism, and patriarchy that are the foundational causes of injustice. At SJF, we aim to liberate our organizational culture and practices by uprooting white supremacist norms and putting Black liberation, Indigenous sovereignty, anti-capitalism, and reparations frameworks at the center of our work. We affirm that decolonization is not a metaphor, unequivocally support the return of land to its original stewards, and seek opportunities to support such work.
What this value looks like in practice at SJF:
*We want to share Decolonization with our community as an eventual part of our entire set of values because we feel the set is not complete without it; together, these values form a complete picture and without it they cannot. However, we believe SJF has work to do before we can embody Decolonization more fully. We will share more insight into our thought and action process to embody this value in a blog post to be published in Spring 2023.
We understand power as the ability to control, change, and/or create outcomes. Collective power — power that is shared by many people instead of just a few through collective decision making, mutual encouragement, and an abundance of pathways for growth — is key to working toward liberation because it distributes and creates more power instead of limiting it arbitrarily or unjustly.
What this value looks like in practice at SJF:
Our work is grounded in the idea of abundance: that, together, we have what we need for everyone to live full, sweet lives. Plenty of societies have existed that worked differently than the one in which we live; it’s SJF’s responsibility to fund organizing that breathes life into better alternatives. We are motivated by endless possibility and radical imagination instead of scarcity and risk; we are excited by futures that deconstruct and replace capitalism and its norms. In SJF’s approach to resource organizing, “resources” include lived experiences, relationships, wisdom, and people power in addition to money. If we create our policies and practices with abundance in mind, we can look beyond the limitations of capitalism and white supremacy.
What this value looks like in practice at SJF:
We believe equity and accessibility means that everyone can access the resources they need to thrive and fully participate in their communities with the goal of achieving self-determined wellbeing and liberation. Access to money has the profound power to open access to other vital resources. As a funding organization, we see moving money in support of equity and accessibility as a vital part of our role in the movement for social justice. We know that we, as an organization, are part of a society built on historical and ongoing institutions of oppression and exploitation that produce inequity. We continually strive to dismantle all manifestations of these institutions in our work.
What this value looks like in practice at SJF:
*In this context, we use the term “accessibility” to describe how accessible resources and systems are to people impacted by structural oppression. However, this word is used within our field to also describe accessibility of spaces, tools, and technology for people with disabilities. SJF has identified disability justice as an area where we need to grow our knowledge and practices. As of Winter 2022, we are contracting with disability justice consultants to undertake this work. We want to be clear about what we’re referencing with this value, currently, and note that we plan to continue developing this value with greater specificity around disability justice when we’ve done more to embody disability justice principles within our organization.
We believe accountability means an ongoing effort to make sure our actions reflect our values in all areas of our work. To do this, we build opportunities for feedback and critique into our policies and practices. When we hurt or harm, we work to repair relationships, understand and take action to support the needs of the hurt/harmed party, and transform our organization with the lessons we learned. We reject the concept of perfectionism, but affirm the importance of continual learning and change to build solidarity and strengthen movements for social justice.
What this value looks like in practice at SJF:
Read our blog post on Transformation at SJF
As the world transforms, so do its movements for social justice: communities uncover new ways to understand, communicate, strategize, and drive change. To fulfill our mission, SJF must also continually transform so we can support our grantees, staff, members, and wider community as one part of a larger movement. We commit ourselves to regularly evaluating the needs of these groups and transforming our policies, practices, and programming to best meet those needs in pursuit of a just and liberated world. We center rest and honoring our humanity as necessary practices in transformation to prevent burnout and perfectionism.
What this value looks like in practice at SJF:
Primary contributors
SJF Staff: Marc Mazique, Shardé Nabors, and Alison Cheung
SJF Board: Em Bookstein
Secondary contributors
SJF Staff members (2020-2022)
SJF Board (2020-2022)
Dr. Tashia Harris
Resources (concepts and language referenced in the values development process)
The Combahee River Collective Statement
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
bell hooks
With permission, we modeled the format of our values (definition followed by values in action) on the format used by Surge Reproductive Justice. We are grateful for their leadership of thought!