12 Principles
for Action

We are building community based on relationships, experiences and commitment to shared futures. We neither assume that community exists nor submit unnecessarily to categorisations that are created by the state, media-industrial complex, or hierarchies, for bureaucratic convenience and/or control.

We focus more on building relationships between those who recognise themselves as contributors and beneficiaries of our efforts, than on imposing any orthodoxy of thought/belief beyond shared humanity. We avoid the distraction created by the policing of the boundaries/borders of ethnicity, gender or sexuality — we lose when categorisations that we rely on to liberate in solidarity against oppression become tools used to sow dissent. We prefer 'Black is Black' to 'Black is, Black ain't'.

There is no one better placed to understand our needs and ambitions, or respond to them, than us.

We understand the importance of nurturing leadership and being responsive to the influence of leaders from all parts of the community we are building.

We do not claim a monopoly on knowledge or legitimacy and some will find it easier to express their leadership through different means or define themselves in opposition to our organising.

While keen to offer clarification of what we are seeking to achieve, our desire to be open to future work in communion with Black queer men will require diplomacy at times. This will be aided by clarity about our accountability to each other, and how we understand reparation and healing as a movement and as individuals.

Rather than viewing our differences as a problem to overcome, we welcome and need the challenge that comes with difference and encourage deliberation as a source of innovation.

We all have a part to play in our collective liberation. We operate in a society riven by inequality, so work actively to counteract the impact that unfair discrimination and exclusion pose to full participation.

We understand that unity does not require uniformity. Our basic requirement for all seeking to share community is mutual respect and a commitment to treating each other as we in turn would like to be treated.

Market competition may work as a way of distributing scarce resources in many contexts but in developing community it is too often wasteful and destructive of relationships. We prize our collective human capital and believe that it can grow through creating value together, even though collaboration can pose challenges and requires unlearning patterns and protocols of competition that are widespread in many areas of our lives.

Collaborative working is more likely to create shared experiences that are key to building our community. It also builds habits of solidarity, shared ownership, and commitment to shared futures that are often absent from market-based interventions.

We all have assets (skills, experience, networks and talents) to offer even when those assets are not completely visible to ourselves or denied by others. Part of the work of building relationships that sustain us is to understand and activate those assets for both individual and collective benefit.

We are creating the conditions for our survival and building resilient communities among Black queer men. We understand the benefits to physical and mental health of working to address the ‘wider determinants’ of health, including socio-economic, environmental and cultural conditions.

We value and promote the creation of sustainable, supportive networks of men, both through and beyond our interventions, and seek a legacy for our work that includes the growth of assets that bolster the resilience of Black queer men.

We recognise the impact of violence and trauma in our lives, the damage that is caused by patriarchal masculinities and white supremacy, and that we cause to each other. We make space for healing and view community as a resource in helping us to address trauma.

We recognise the importance of self-care. We want to take every opportunity to create cultures in which care is a shared commitment, leading to a more sustainable and sustaining community of care.

Unfortunately, we harm each other because we are human and subject to trauma, so we make space for accountability, reparation, justice, healing, and reconciliation as necessary tools to stay in community with each other.

We are working towards an integrity-positive, delivery-focused culture in which we consciously take steps to make it easier to manage expectations, be accountable, take our share of responsibility, and build trust. We recognise that this will take time and is about both formal structures and informal relationships.

We work with others who share similar values to deliver mutually beneficial outcomes and seek to communicate clearly the parameters of any partnerships.

We strive to act in solidarity and appreciate those who act in solidarity with us; in particular those who are active in their support, open doors to opportunity, and influence those they are proximate to.

Where possible we prefer to operate as accomplices: a more active way of supporting movements that mobilises our privileges and skills to disrupt patterns of injustice alongside those most impacted, rather than ‘allyship’ that can quickly become performative. We are mindful of the limits of our own resources and will seek to share the outcomes of our privilege, or proximity to privilege, in a manner that disrupts rather than reinforces existing power dynamics.

We have witnessed too many promising movements flounder due to a lack of transparency, fallouts over money, and personal grievances that started small becoming overwhelming in effect. We seek therefore to create a culture of accountability that recognises the roles we can and do play in harming each other through our actions and inactions, and which holds space for recognition and reparation.

We aim to share information freely and be accountable to our community as stakeholders, rather than just to the funders who require regular reports.

We will use transparency dynamically to engage all stakeholders in how we make decisions, and seek to evidence our rationale for taking action through regular reporting and continuous research and development.

Homophobia, colonialism, racism, and the mistaken strategy of respectability in response, have combined to erase us from our histories and denied us the inheritance of wisdom from our forebears and the habits and routes for our legacy. We actively seek to reclaim and celebrate our histories. We commit to documenting and archiving our work as legacy for the future.

We seek to learn from the experiences of those we admire and maximise learning from our own actions by evaluating practice and making the results available for others building movements for justice.

We believe our liberation requires transformation of our society rather than simply reform. As a result, we undertake interventions that demonstrate a radical reframing of society. This requires a seriousness of approach but should never preclude opportunities for joy, laughter and celebration.

We create spaces that are capable of including us all. We seek to remove barriers to participation. While not all spaces will suit all of us at all times, we will create a balance across our interventions to appeal to a broad range of interests, and to address a broad range of needs.

We create interventions that support participants to be their best selves.