A Compassionate Humanity Community Proclamation
Compassionate communities are improving our culture and our institutions. Structural reforms nurture mutual support for personal and spiritual growth. These changes help individuals undo divisive, selfish, competitive, domineering socialization.
Increasing cooperation is cultivating an emerging compassionate humanity movement. These efforts are based on Gandhi’s principle: “Be the change you seek.” This proclamation is intended to help unify those who contribute to this movement, whether or not they explicitly identify with it and affirm Our Commitment.
Embrace Core Values
The movement serves humanity, the environment, and life itself and is based on these principles:
Advance justice and compassion.
Improve ourselves and support each other.
Undo oppressive social conditioning.
Respect those who engage in spiritual growth.
Acknowledge each person’s equal worth.
Set aside the desire to dominate for personal gain.
Cultivate bottom-up hierarchies.
Nurture relational equality and co-equal partnerships throughout society.
Support grassroots, broad-based, unified, independent, activist campaigns.
Ensure that everyone can meet their basic needs, participate fully in society, and fulfill their potential.
Oppose discrimination based on identity.
Create new structures and organizations to solidify these improvements.
Form Small Teams
The movement is based on small teams whose members affirm Our Commitment and embrace the Core Values.
Informal teams spring from relationships with friends, relatives, colleagues, or group memberships.
Formal teams conduct “holistic check-ins” during which members report on the following: In what way have I worked on bringing more compassion into my life?
Affiliated teams are organizations that affirm Our Commitment, promote the movement’s Core Values, and encourage and help their members provide mutual support for their self-development, while retaining their primary focus.
These teams are learning communities that facilitate peer learning, self-reform, collaborative teamwork, political action, and mutual support.
Members become better listeners and speak honestly. They practice what they preach and push institutions to live their ideals.
Support Pragmatic Idealism
In an address in Cape Town, South Africa in 1966, Robert Kennedy affirmed the value of pragmatic idealism: “We know that only those who dare to fail greatly ever achieve greatly.”
Simone Weil wrote: “Limits are only legitimate if the needs of all human beings receive equal attention… The needs are earthly, for those are the only ones that man can satisfy.”
Valarie Kaur affirms: “We are reclaiming love as a force for justice.”
The compassionate humanity movement is rooted in these beliefs.
Human beings deal with countless polarities. Handling these tensions requires balance, flexibility, and integration. Everyone is a unique member of the human family with multiple identities.
The movement is diverse and pragmatic, moving forward step-by-step, focused on achievable goals within its transformational framework.
Cultivate Collaborative Leadership
Collaborative leadership overcomes social fragmentation and oppressive top-down domination. It builds the unity that’s needed to sustain lasting change. It establishes personal and economic security, overcoming fear and hate.
It channels anger into action using Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Principles and Steps for Nonviolent Social Change. Compromise is paramount.
Ever more nations support the U.N. rule of law:
All persons, institutions and entities are accountable to laws that are publicly promulgated, equally enforced, and independently adjudicated, and which are consistent with international human rights norms and standards.
Ever more nations support the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
The U.N. General Assembly proclaims this Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights.
Pursue Compassionate Action
We are inspired by the Charter for Compassion:
We call upon all men and women to restore compassion to the centre of morality and religion — to return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate — to ensure that youth are given accurate and respectful information about other traditions, religions and cultures — to encourage a positive appreciation of cultural and religious diversity — to cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of all human beings.
Movement members learn and grow. We strengthen our organization through alliances with like-minded organizations. We balance individuals and community.
We challenge top-down structures and public policies and engage in political action. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. declared: Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.
Promote Transformation
Our movement is a multi-issue, other-centered movement rooted in universal moral values committed to gains for all humanity, the environment, and life. We urge institutions to serve the common good. We facilitate peer learning and mutual support.
We nurture cooperation and partnership. We enable others to meet basic needs — economic and personal security, equality, dignity, and respect. We promote freedom from discrimination based on religious, ethnic, or sexual identity.
Reconciliations contribute to transformation, which takes place in relations within and among individuals, communities, corporations, and nations.
As this transformation ripples through society, a compelling vision forms on the horizon: a society that in many respects looks, feels, and is NEW!
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Related: A Compassionate Humanity Community Proclamation, Wade Lee Hudson and Larry Walker