WHIM Values

Everything that happens in the Resource Center aims to help people to practice and embody the following four values:

• Wakefulness - developing a critical consciousness that involves decoding the narratives that naturalize the status quo, while searching for alternative interpretations of one’s situation.
• Hopefulness - the development and support of imagining, desiring, and enacting realities beyond the ones we currently inhabit.
• Interconnectedness - seeing ourselves, our communities, our environments, and our histories as whole, interdependent, and having innate worth and meaning.
• Mightiness- awakening agency and the power to perform our roles differently.

                                                                                        

• We all struggle with the conflicts and contradictions inherent within realizing a pluralistic and liberatory community. Our own capacities for collusion makes us part of the problems we are trying to solve.
• Practicing wakefulness is about raising our own and other people’s consciousness of the causes and effects of sociohistorically constructed categories of human differences that position us differently in our shared environments.
• It entails trying to move from self-righteousness, debate, and alienation to inquiry, dialogue, and integration with the intention of supporting everyone to (a) develop the curiosity, willingness, and flexibility necessary to deepen their connection with self and others, (b) be mindful of how oppression has limited everyone’s ability to be our whole and empathetic selves, and (c) share and agree upon a common vision and purpose that will allow us to recover from and transform the oppressive patterns within which we were socialized.
• Practicing wakefulness allows us to practice our humanity by (a) increasing our awareness of self and others, (b) enabling us to accept responsibility for the way internalized domination and subordination impacts our attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and relationships, (c) helping us to critically question the things we are taught to believe that we need on a deep psychosocial level, and (d) supporting our ability to clarify what we intend to do, be, or effect in response to transforming the conditions that sustain injustice, violence, and suffering.
• Programming at the Resource Center should help campus stakeholders to engage in dialogues and practices that help us deal with such conflicts as: (a) sameness and difference, (b) anger and apathy (c) assimilation and nonconformity, (d) unity and pluralism, (e) recognition and redistribution, (f) agency and structure, (g) righteousness and effectiveness, (h) control and liberation, and (i) action and reflection.

                                                                                          

• We all struggle with the socioemotional consequences of passive and active bystanding to the daily oppression in our communities. Despite the many personal and social experiences that tell us to avoid, diminish, and move on from the oppressive realities that surround us, nothing positive can be done about our condition without hope and confidence in the human spirit.
• Practicing hopefulness is about supporting our own and other people’s motivation to imagine, create, and heal in order to embrace the challenges and opportunities that come with accepting the notion that “I am because we are”.
• It entails trying to move from consumption, transactionality, and regulation to (re)generation, vulnerability, and liberation with the intention of building everyone’s capacities to unlearn oppressive practices and view ourselves as nurturers of change and growth.
• Practicing hopefulness allows us to transform the powerlessness we may feel as bystanders to and recipients of state, school, family, and peer sanctioned violence, misinformation, and false consciousness by demonstrating the restorative potential of human interactions and strengthening our capacities to empathize, reflect, and build new realities and relationships with others.
• Programming at the Resource Center should help students to: (a) reflect on how we motivate and sustain each other to stay aware of and fight against feelings of hopelessness, resignation, resentment, and disconnection, (b) engage in cultural practices where we can bring our whole, flawed selves into dialogue with others about how we have grappled with such things as vulnerability, pain, mistakes, insecurity, trauma, uncertainty, confusion, hypocrisy, discrimination, and fear along our own personal journeys, and (c) support each other’s personal development and healing in order to imagine and practice a different social reality than we may currently have.

                                                                                         

• We all struggle with de-centering productivity, utility, and external pressures and re-centering relationships, health and wellness, and internal motivations in our lives.  Balancing the multiplicity of demands, desires, and pressures that influence who we are and what we want to become often forces us to compartmentalize aspects of our lives and consciousness.
• Practicing interconnectedness is about understanding our own and other people’s values, purpose, and experiences; recognizing that everything is relational and how we construct truth and our sense of self is personal, social, and dynamic.
• It entails trying to move from conformity, binary thinking, and competition to hybridity, relational thinking, and interdependence with the intention of encouraging everyone to examine how our unconscious values, intentions, and actions impact our lives, each other, and our world.
• Practicing interconnectedness allows us to be aware of the limits, patterns, histories, and contradictions of the multiple frames of reference that influence how we each uniquely see and experience the world so that we are able to resist discourses and structures that divide us.
• Programming at the Resource Center should help campus stakeholders to engage in cultural practices where: (a) we connect how our personal and collective histories impact our present day realities and dialogue is opened through and beyond individual suffering and experience, (b) everyone is supported to acknowledge their agency in resisting sociohistorical patterns in one’s communal, familial, and personal histories, and (c) we are allowed to explore, question, and learn from what is unknown, uncertain, unconscious, and unseen (e.g. our fears, doubts, habits, aspirations, motivations, ambiguities, and contradictions).

                                                                                               

• We are all capable of making and learning from our mistakes. To err is what it means to be socialized in an oppressive society where all our choices and humanity is limited. Our ability to learn from our mistakes and create more just and inclusive norms and practices is predicated upon our ability to take ownership over our fears, habits, and biases so that we are able to become the change that we want to see in our world.
• Practicing mightiness is about encouraging ourselves and each other to build the critical self-knowledge, interpersonal skills, and perseverance needed to sustain individual and coalitional actions for social justice.
• It entails trying to move from defensiveness, avoidance, and immobilization to integrity, resilience, and collective responsibility with the intention of building our capacities to collaboratively respond to the uncertainty and risk of social and personal change.
• Practicing mightiness facilitates our ability to (a) lean into the discomfort of our biases, insecurities, and unawareness to make our values congruent with our behaviors, (b) link our hopes for our world and ourselves with responsive and collective action, (c) leverage our positionality, power, and privilege to the service of others who do not have that power.
• Programming at the Resource Center should help campus stakeholders to: (a) dialogue about what can aid our community members in addressing their own capacities for collusion, apathy, demoralization, isolation, and self-harm, (b) reflect on their struggles with the belief and cultural systems they were born into, have made significant investments and agreements with, and are now trying to find their place within, and (c) work collaboratively within community to practice new patterns of liberatory thought and behavior.