A Compassionate Humanity Community Proclamation
Compassionate communities are growing. They're improving our culture and our major social institutions. Structural improvements nurture mutual support for personal and spiritual growth, which helps individuals undo divisive, selfish, competitive, and domineering socialization.
Increased cooperation is cultivating an emerging united, nonviolent, grassroots compassionate humanity movement. These mutually reinforcing nonviolent efforts are based on Gandhi’s principle: “Be the change you seek.”
This proclamation is intended to help unify countless individuals and organizations that contribute to this movement.
Embrace Core Values
The compassionate humanity 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.
Honor spiritual growth.
Respect 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
Small teams form the movement’s network. Members affirm the core values and support each other.
Informal teams spring from relationships with friends, relatives, colleagues, or group memberships.
Formal teams strengthen the movement. With “holistic check-ins,” team members briefly respond to this question: In what way have I worked on becoming a better human being?
Other teams are affiliated teams whose organizations affirm and promote the movement’s values. These organizations retain their primary focus while contributing to this broader vision.
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 integrate related issues They push institutions to live their ideals.
Support Pragmatic Idealism
The movement is diverse and pragmatic, moving forward step-by-step, focused on achievable goals within the transformation framework.
Human beings deal with polarities. Handling these tensions requires balance, flexibility, and integration. This ever-changing mix of tensions creates countless combinations. Everyone is a unique member of the human family with multiple identities.
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.”
Cultivate Collaborative Leadership
Collaborative leadership avoids social fragmentation. It builds unity 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, spiritual movement rooted in universal moral values committed to gains for all humanity, the environment, and life. We enable institutions to pursue their ideals and 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 looks, feels, and is NEW!