Our Values
The Voices and Experiences of Women
To end gender-based violence, we must start by centering the voices of women. Women and femme-identified persons experience harm and marginalization in a male-centered society. Women in Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color, as well as in LGBTQ+ communities, experience increased levels of harm. The stories of the most vulnerable must guide our work to eliminate the structures, systems, and beliefs that uphold patriarchal violence. In a culture where victim-blaming and the criminalization of survivors is still prevalent, women’s experiences must undergird our work.
Truth-Telling
Transformation requires that we are willing to immerse ourselves in truth-telling. Truth-telling encourages us to take accountability for our actions, as well as who we’ve been, who we are, and who we become. It helps us recognize that we have autonomy over our choices and actions, rather than allowing our actions to be dictated by misguided loyalties to harmful masculine norms. Truth-telling can heal broken men, restore damaged relationships, and reverse destructive cycles of violence.
Men’s Holistic Healing and Wellness
The holistic health of men plays a pivotal role in our efforts to eliminate violence. Current norms for male socialization cause men to suppress their full humanity and remain silent in the face of harm they experience. The resistance to vulnerability creates and normalizes destructive conditions, such as isolation, depression, anger, and aggression. To heal, men must embrace self-care and engage in practices that help them regain a sense of spiritual wholeness.
Communal and Collective Care
Collective care assumes that our communal health and well-being are the shared responsibility of all in the community. When our communities are fully united around self-determination and collective responsibility, safety and justice are valued as community commitments, not as mandates imposed by outside forces.
Systemic and Institutional Change
Our work to eradicate violence depends on a radical transformation of systems and institutions that contribute to a culture that upholds inequities and breeds violence. Addressing individual acts of violence apart from the power systems that perpetuate and support violence, will do little to eliminate its existence. Supremacist culture, in all its forms, must be disrupted, in order for peace and justice to flourish in our communities and our homes.
The Oneness of Humanity
We believe that violence is rooted in notions of separation. When we see ourselves as separate from one another - separate due to race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, abilities, or other identifiers - we begin to see those we perceive to be different as the “other.” Power structures rely on the dehumanization of the “other” to instill hate, create division, and maintain control. While we are fully aware of the traumatic impacts of current and historical harms, and work diligently to repair what these harms have created, NO HARM’s mission is not found in fighting hate, but rather in creating peace - a peace that is built on our belief in one humanity.
