Propelling Values

This phrasing of values, like a propeller, drives healthy decision-making on the way toward a more ethical world. Unlike other listings of values, each of these is an invitation to check if a vital condition is present or absent in a meeting, conversation, or activity. In other words, the audience that cares about evolving more healthy social systems can attend to its own well-being.

These seven statements of over-arching values are guides to build and maintain democratic processes. Each represents a condition for cooperation and generation visible sign of health in community activity.

When something is amiss, the people involved can see it and take action free of exterior restrictions, traditional power structures, and negativity.

Propelling values energize and maintain democratic health. In other words, these are the seven conditions for people to do good work.

Persistence

These particular phrasings of values are formulated as guides for democratic groups who are working toward a better future over the long haul.

Propelling Values defend group work from authoritarian subversion. The optimize the valuing of opportunities for communities of educators, program supervisors, advocates, families, staff, and community groups to work towards creating spaces for young children that work for those children in ways the community chooses.

Propelling Values define, steer, renew, and evolve new ways of working together as agents of change by being self-reflective, by listening to the usually silent, and by seeking course corrections along the way.

Here are seven Propelling Values keep groups healthy over the long term as they contemplate events and chose directions in open, inclusive, and inventive ways.

Groups that wish to sustain democratic processes need strong, clear values and cherish them with solemn persistence.

Belonging

We ensure the perception of being included in diverse and multiple communities.
Children belong at school, in care settings, at home, in the family, and in the community; whatever situation people find themselves in, they belong.
Families belong.
Teachers belong.
The community belongs.
When belonging is a value, anytime we find someone who does not feel included, we fix it.

Well-being

We offer an ethic of care for health, in all dimensions, for children and families.
An ethic of care maintains and repairs our world, so we can live in the best way possible.
We enable groups and individuals to think critically and question our commonplace assumptions, within our relationships with each other.
When well-being is a value, anytime we find something unhealthy, we fix it, even if it is difficult to do.

Reciprocity of Relationships

We are, ourselves, becoming and changing, in a passionate, compassionate, and aesthetic relationship with those whose lives we wish to enhance.
In the exchange with each other, as allies-in-action, we disarm power and privilege.
Reciprocity and mutuality enable us to co-construct what it means to be a human being, living and working with others to create a more ideal society through reflective practice.
We thrive in the beauty of our being together.
When reciprocity of relationships is a value, we stay open to being profoundly changed in every encounter.

Participation

We invite the participation of all into creating our possibility and defining our opportunity through our interaction.
We offer spaces (physical and social), languages, time, and organizational systems that are open and somewhat indefinite.
School is a form of community life.
When participation is a value, we make sure every outlier is included and has a voice.

Joy

We are playful — cherishing spontaneity, laughter, wonder, and vibrancy.
When joy is a value, we take care to enter each moment with good humor and loving kindness.

Wholeness

We appreciate others, young and old, as whole, competent, capable human beings connected to other children and adults.
Humans are an indefinite, integrated complexity — with bodies, minds, emotions, creativity, history, cultures, and identity.
Children are not bearing needs nor are they immature or incomplete.
Children, parents, and members of the community are competent.
When wholeness is a value, we remain aware of the fundamental goodness of being human.

Trust

We listen carefully to discover the ways of being of others as we stay truthful ourselves.
What others choose to do is how they are being in this here and now; it says nothing of the future.
We maintain our faith and love, unconditionally.
We listen.
We understand that responsibility emerges through trust.
When trust is a value, we open space for situations to be as they are, seeking honesty while accepting uncertainty.

Propelling Values Guide a Better Future

In the midst of confusing daily life with its constant uncertainty, the Propelling Values ought to help us in the choices to make, alterations to discover, and benefits everyone can see. Otherwise, a claim of a more esoteric value, absent dimensions of application, can make little difference in people’s lives.

A quick search for phrasings of values we may aspire to—such as authenticity, generosity, justice, respect—are difficult to grasp and, therefore, can’t serve as guides for daily actions or course corrections. If someone is not authentic or generous, what can be done to fix that inadequacy?

The values above are actionable. Each points out choices in planning and care along our chosen course.

Guiding values in a democracy.

Values We Share