Practices

Our work as a collective is grounded in four key practices. In everything we do, we hold at the center our vision and goal of liberation for all,  our lived understanding of faith, our commitment to care and wellness, and our belief in the power of personal and communal transformation.
 

Liberation is all of life living in right relationship. It’s a world in which all beings are free in every sense of the word; where all of us get to show up whole and valued as our full selves in every part of our lives.

As people who are called to work toward liberation, we hold this vision and imagining as our ultimate goal at all times. For us, seeking liberation is the work of faith and deep dreaming, of imagining the unimaginable and trusting that the unimaginable is possible, despite all of the daily evidence to the contrary. We hold liberation as possible and as the center of everything we do because it’s the foundation that hope thrives on. It’s a radical act of resistance and faith to keep moving toward liberation.

Queer spirituality, to us, isn’t just an individual queer person’s sense of spirit or faith practice. It’s a spirituality that is fully liberated and liberatory; a spirituality that promotes wholeness and resilience for all people, particularly those who are oppressed.

Queer spirituality is about people of all sexualities and genders centering and celebrating our bodies, our experiences, and our identities as inherently sacred and whole, not as something to be “reconciled” with religion or spirituality. We are called to join with other queer and trans folks to access faith and spirit in whatever ways are meaningful to us, individually and collectively — whether that’s empowering each other to find or co-create something new, outside the bounds of organized religion, or helping religious communities dismantle barriers and create new paradigms for practicing their faith in liberatory ways. To us, as queer and trans people of faith, queer spirituality not only saves lives, it provides a path forward to save our world.

Healing justice seeks to decolonize well-being, resilience, and healing, creating spaces that fully embrace how trauma, oppression, and injustice intersect with folks’ access to resources for physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. 

The framework of healing justice is grounded in the leadership of queer and trans folks of color, particularly those who are disabled and/or femme, who speak to the need for transformational responses to generational violence and trauma in justice movements. We follow this framework by bringing attention to healing in every space we’re in, supporting each other in healing from oppression over and over again and embracing the idea that caring for communities creates well-being for individuals. To us, being grounded in healing justice means practicing heart-centered activism—holding as central truths that only a just process can create just outcomes and that how we treat each other is itself the work of liberation.

Radical welcome is about what it takes to build real, resilient, revolutionary community among people who differ from each other. It’s about unlearning cultural norms that create barriers and perpetuate stereotypes and inequities and choosing instead to risk vulnerability, discomfort, and struggle in order to create and sustain deep relationships across lines of difference.

This work requires moving beyond simple friendliness to soul-deep transformational change, dismantling oppressive obstacles rather than retroactively responding to people who are new or “different.” Rather than “making room at the table,” it’s about asking whether a table is even the right place for us to be gathering. Ultimately, radical welcome is about relocating the margins to the center. When we embrace radical welcome, we embrace the fact that only through personal and communal transformation and culture shift will we create spaces that are liberatory for all.