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If you want a say in how this community will operate, you can add your feedback at the bottom of this page.
To peruse the rest of our Community Blueprints, click here.
Whenever we have a safety concern that isn’t about another Member, we can submit the following form:
The Conflict Resolution Team will receive the feedback and take appropriate action, according to the requested outcome.
The only person who can assess whether harm was done is the person who feels they were harmed. If they say they were harmed, they were harmed.
Because we always assume that our fellow members are acting in good faith, we begin the conflict resolution process under the assumption that no one is an aggressor and that the person who caused the harm did not intend to do so.
The goals of the conflict resolution process are to:
The first (and, in most cases, only) step of conflict resolution, assuming the victim of harm feels safe to do so, is to try to address the issue one-on-one. When we feel hurt by something another member said or did, we promptly, directly, and respectfully tell them so. When someone tells us we’ve hurt them, we try not to get defensive. We listen, we apologize, and we move on. Most conflict in our community should be resolved this way.
When one-on-one conversations don’t resolve the problem, members can engage our Conflict Resolution Team for help. This is a team of members who have been a part of DT4T for 6+ months. They are additionally vetted as Conflict Resolution Stewards. The person who was harmed remains in control of the process; the Conflict Resolution Team can just help them resolve the problem.
To engage the Conflict Resolution Team, members can fill out the following form:
The Conflict Resolution Team will proceed accordingly. The form submission and the Conflict Resolution process will remain confidential.
Banning members is a last resort because we believe in everyone’s ability to grow and evolve. As a majority-trans community with plenty of members who became disabled as adults, we know more than most groups how totally a person’s values and behavior can evolve in response to time and new information.
The following are the only reasons a member can be permanently banned from DT4T:
In other cases, the solution may be a suspension or a probationary period. The victim of harm, as well as others at risk of harm, will lead the decision-making.
DT4T tries not to replicate the mistakes of other, especially white-led, communities where BIPOC feel unwelcome, unseen, or unsafe.
We aim to avoid these mistakes by not being “led” by any one person or group. The people most affected by the outcome of a given decision are the people who make the decision, ensuring that white voices will never take precedence over anyone else’s.
We hope and expect that members who are impacted by particular forms of racial and cultural oppression, such as Islamophobia, colonial displacement, anti-Indigeneity, and anti-Blackness, will steward projects that offer supportive subcommunities for themselves, as well as create opportunities to share their culture with the DT4T community at large. We expect these activities to take place all the time and not just when it’s politically relevant. We expect that white Members will humbly engage with these projects to learn how and when we can help our affected peers, with the understanding that educational labor is never expected or demanded of those experiencing racial or cultural oppression.
One of the most dangerous patterns in community spaces is a lack of planning for tragedies that have a big impact on Members’ wellbeing. This can lead to victims of harm feeling ostracized and excluded, rather than welcome and safe. This is particularly prolific in white-led organizations who don’t have the tools to support members who are affected by racial and cultural violence.
For example, we saw mistakes arise en masse in the responses to George Floyd’s murder and the onset of the genocide in Gaza. Reactively, white leaders tried to correct their racist policies and establish programming to support affected members and educate unaffected members. These corrective actions were ineffective because they didn’t happen until harm had already taken place.
At DT4T, we aim to mobilize readily in response to these kinds of tragedies, thanks to having an established base of values-aligned, vetted members who are all empowered with the resources to lead Emergency Direct Actions.
Our goal is for Members who aren’t personally affected by a given tragedy to do most of the labor to carry out time-sensitive political actions, allowing affected members to focus on coping.
Usually, Events, Groups, and Gatherings need to be approved by community consensus before the calendar quarter they’ll take place in. Emergency Direct Actions do not need to go through this approval process and can take place without advance notice, as long as they abide by the rest of our Core Values & Beliefs. If there is a question about whether something counts as an Emergency Response Action, we give it the benefit of the doubt and allow it to move forward. At the next Quarterly Forum, we will review the action and assess whether we learned anything that suggests we should amend or change this policy.
Being outed as queer, trans, or disabled can have serious legal, professional, and social ramifications for some of our Members. Being publicly associated with a queer, leftist community can also present serious dangers, especially in our current political environment.
We do not post pictures of each other or tag each other on social media without consent. We do not speak about a Member’s identity with non-Members, unless we have express consent from that Member. We respect each other’s right to privacy.
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