OUR VALUES
Passionate about questions of social justice, collective organising, development and civic participation, our missions focus on supporting and strengthening civil society organisations so that they become more empowered and to emancipate the individuals that are a part of them.
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This entails an ethical conscious and code based on founding principles that guide our relations, communications and inter-/actions:
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These principles are rooted in inclusive and participatory approaches (inspired by the éducation populaire ou Freire's pedagogical approach) and are underpinned by feminist, postcolonial and indigenous theories which promote reciprocity, situated knowledge, benefit sharing, relational accountability and care/respect of self, society and the environment.
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The following values are at the centre of our work :
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methodological rigour,
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relational skills,
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co-construction of knowledge and actions,
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reflexive, critical and practical critique,
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engagement towards empowerment and emancipation of all citizens we cooperate with.
Respect
We embrace respectful relations and aim for confidentiality in all our interactions with partners and throughout the cooperation. We promote integrity, reflexive critique, and active and empathic listening.
Co-construction
We tailor our actions and our approaches so that they meet our partners' needs, and we co-develop methods and tools that are specifically suited to the stakes and realities faced by the organisations and individuals we work with.
Participation and engagement
We advocate for ongoing participation and engagement throughout the entirety of the cooperation so that all feel engaged, invested and agents of social change.
Empowerment
We start thinking about the 'after' partnership from the start in order to promote collective organising and group autonomy, so that the work continues once the cooperation has reached its course.
DEFINING THE KEY CONCEPTS WE USE
We believe it's very important for our readers and partners to know where we speak from, meaning that we specify what definitions we associate to the keys concepts we use throughout our work. Indeed, too often are social action and justice terminologies coopted, exploited and emptied of their meaning by individuals/organisms/parties that show little concern for their etymology or activist positioning.
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Below, we retake, recuperate and rehabilitate their meaning*:
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Citizen partnership
By citizen partnership we mean all cooperation between individuals and organisations that are destined to improve collective organising, well being and happiness, social justice and respect for life.
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Participation
We advocate for an approach of participation based on alternative pedagogies that are human centred (opposed to knowledge or skills centred). We do not consider participation as being confined to a practice or a technique (which could thereby limite it to a public consultation for example), rather we look at it as a key component of social action, intrinsic to all phases of a project and all dynamics of a collective. Thus, participation is political, fluid and ethical.
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Intersectionality
We embrace intersectionality as an approach that draws from (political) sociology and that was conceptualised firstly by feminist movements. Intersectionality consists of the recognition for the need and the integration of a sociological analysis of the multiplicity of forms of oppression, domination, subjugation or discrimination experienced by individuals due to their gender, race, ethnicity, religious beliefs, sexual orientations, place of origin, handicap, socioeconomic class.
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Pedagogy
We align ourselves with alternative and participatory pedagogies developed by thinkers stemming from the éducation populaire (with, by, for) and the empowering, emancipating and critical pedagogies (of freedom, of autonomy, of the oppressed) as they are framed by Paulo Freire et peers which position themselves against systems that reproduce and perpetuate capitalist and neocolonial dominations.
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(Self-)Empowerment
We do not consider ourselves indispensable to collective organising or social change. We propose a form of partnership that is focused on (self-)empowerment, thereby meaning that throughout the entirety of the partnership, we prepare our exit, the end of the cooperation, by exchanging with our partners on the different ways that the work can continue beyond our presence, how tools/techniques/methods can be adapted, and we suggest ressources and other key initiatives that can inspire our partners.
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Emancipation
We work towards the emancipation of individuals throughout the entirety of the partnership: emancipation from social norms, from barriers to creativity and life radiance, from the subjugation to sociocultural expectations that limit us, from the obstacles to freedom of speech and being listened to empathically. We advocate for the dismantling of hierarchies and systems that consolidate vertical dominating power. This produces discomfort, relational complexity, social and collective self-organising and solidarity (Starhawk, Morin, Freire).
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Power
We adopt a positive and productive definition of power which generates spaces for multiples resistances, and we embrace the Power Cube approach (Gaventa) that enables a multidimensional power analysis (levels, spaces, forms) through the following four prisms : power over, power to, power with, power within.
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* If you think or know of any other sources to define these terms, let us know here.