Blooming in Space is a horizontally linked network of autonomous groups. We are committed to radically transforming the way we live and we have come together around shared practice of the following values.
1. Power with, not power over
We seek to create, live out, and constantly renegotiate ideas, practices, relationships, organizational forms, and social structures based on “power with,” rather than “power over.”
Power over means that an individual or group may choose to use their greater physical, emotional, intellectual, social, political, or economic power to create the results they want, regardless of the needs of others. Decisions or actions are taken without the consent of the people they affect.
Power with means that everybody’s needs are considered with care and that everyone directly participates in making decisions that affect them. All people may be committed to meeting their own needs, while equally working to find strategies that address everyone else’s needs.
Power with is power as creative capacity to act; it is empowerment. It fuels a dynamic process based on continuous participation and exchange.
2. Non-hierarchical and directly participatory internal structure
Relevant decision making and organizational styles are often termed non-hierarchical, horizontal, anarchist, and/or anti-authoritarian. Groups that do not wish to label themselves are encouraged to join the Blooming in Space network if they share the rest of the common ground and consider their structure to be non-hierarchical and directly participatory.
3. Mutual Aid
We collectively work to mutually aid one another by freely sharing knowledge, resources, tools, technologies and people power.
4. Anti-oppression
We seek to dismantle and eliminate all forms of systematic violence and oppression, both internally within our groups and in the world around us. We wish to catalyze personal and interpersonal change along with radical social change by using tools and strategies such as nonviolent communication.
5. Solidarity
When and in the manner invited, we will work to freely share and to make available and accessible knowledge, resources, technologies and people power to historically marginalized communities in each of our group’s local areas. We assume responsibility for making our work relevant to the lives and struggles of these communities. Rather than offering charity or going into communities with projects already in mind, we may offer to open up dialogue and ask what people need and how they desire to be supported, if at all.
6. Radical Sustainability
Sustainability means:
• Working to extend ecological health into the indefinite future. Asking, “How long can this system last?”
• Recognizing the intrinsic value of all life forms and the interconnection between human and ecological health.
• Creating landscapes that are ecologically regenerative rather than destructive, using design models such as permaculture.
• Building and promoting small-scale, self-sufficient systems that generate and store more energy than they consume.
• Using the least amount of resources possible to meet our needs.
• Opposing disturbance of further wilderness and working to stabilize damaged ecosystems.
Radical sustainability is all of this plus the recognition that the current ecological crisis cannot be addressed without fundamental changes to present-day systems of thought, design, and implementation. This means that our new ideological, technological, and economic structures must be more than simply ecological in nature. Knowledge and materials for our solutions must be locally-based and shared, and the design, implementation, and control must be in the hands of the people who are most directly affected.
7. Responsibility for everyone’s needs
We are collectively responsible for the physical, mental, emotional, social and spiritual needs of all people in each community and associated local projects.
We empower ourselves to mobilize resources, be they external or internal, to meet these needs.
External resources include money, connections, social status, privilege, educational capital, access to information and other resources, etc.
Internal resources include qualities such as level of self-connection, awareness of choice, capacity to make choices that meet our own and others’ needs, stories and belief systems, temperament, etc.
All people have the right to identify and define their own needs.
8. Autonomy
We respect the internal choices and decision-making processes made by all communities associated with the project.
We are striving to build horizontally organized infrastructure on a local/bioregional level that is autonomous from systems of domination, such as the state and the capitalist economy. For example, this may include the creation of local alternative economies, local food security, free schools, medical clinics, mental health collectives, community centers, assisted living homes for the elderly and people with special needs, conflict mediation teams, etc.)
