Community Values

Groundswell is an open-source social action site that provides an online activism toolset to the multifaith movement for justice. 

When we say multifaith, we mean people motivated by faith, spirituality or moral commitment to stand up, speak out, work together, and take action.

When we say movement, we mean the organizations, leaders, donors, activists, people, and connective tissue who, motivated by faith and moral commitment, are working to heal and repair a broken world. 

When we say "for justice," we mean that we are advocating for a world that is free, strong, compassionate, and prosperous -- and animated by the following values. 

Human Dignity
Human beings in all their diversity and multiplicity are naturally valuable and deserve, by mere virtue of the fact that they live and breathe to be treated with honor and respect and to receive equal protection and treatment within the public and private sphere. 

Vulnerability 
The capacity to engage openly with one another as imperfect, sometimes broken but always beloved is a resource in social justice-based action and transformation. Our fragility and the capacity to be vulnerable binds human beings to one another and expands our ability to understand ourselves as interconnected and interdependent.

Right Relationship 
We are our sister’s/ brother’s keeper, and together we are all care-takers for creation. Being in right relation with all life requires recognizing a covenantal obligation between individuals and the collective to create opportunities and systems that ensure the possibility for the full flourishing of all. 

Sacred Safety 
Everyone deserves to be at home in their bodies and free from violence, degradation and humiliation within their families, institutions and in the wider world. Both the actual attainment of this state and the struggle to achieve it are hallowed and holy activities. 

Compassion 
Human beings are meant to have an open and broken heart for each other and for all life. This means the suffering of individuals, communities and indeed for the entire planet is not something we can turn our backs on.Rather we are obliged to move toward those who suffer and generate through our movement toward one another, ways to alleviate that suffering. 

Pluralism 
Our being is defined by difference even as we share a common need for love, justice, companionship and peace. We must go beyond tolerance – bare acceptance of one another – and embrace pluralism as an expansive and inclusive orientation that ignites our capacity to create systems and structures grounded in multiple expressions of human being in the world.

Hospitality
Human beings are meant to share the bounty of the earth with each other, and to create a sense of home and place for all. When we extend ourselves in hospitality toward one other we begin to embody a spirit of expansive generosity toward all life and strive to create systems and structures that support that spirit. 

Embodiment 
Our bodies are sacred spaces that contain the stories of all that is simultaneously beautiful and tragic within the human condition, and those stories are critical resources and reservoirs of knowledge for activism. When we value ourselves and others as embodied beings we actively create opportunities for individuals and communities to tell the stories of love and justice, of courage and struggle, of pain and possibility that define them. Wonder, beauty, joy, celebration, and bliss Inherent creativity fuels the core of all being. That positively creative core is where our ability to sing, dance, play and dream the expansive dream of truly abundant and whole life resides. 

You're welcome to come in and use this tool to work towards a shared goal of building the overall movement and you respect the people around you. We take a very broad view of activism motivated by religious or moral values, and an expansive view of what makes up this movement. 

At times we may disagree with what is and isn't in line with the goal of building a multifaith movement for justice – that's healthy. However, we reserve the right to remove campaigns that aren't in line with our view of what makes up the multifaith movement for justice . If we feel we need to close a campaign, we won't do it lightly. We'll consult a broad variety of partners in the multifaith movement for justice and communicate openly about the decision making process we undertake to the petition creator and the broader community.