DAF Charter

DEEP ADAPTATION FORUM’S CHARTER

Last revised: June 16th, 2022

This living Charter is meant to shape and guide our aspiration to embody loving responses to our predicament.

Governance: We come together globally to engage in projects, events, skills development, and mutual care. We work in self-organised groups to make decisions that affect us, primarily via consent decision-making. We welcome new projects as long as they are in the spirit of our mission and charter. As our environment shifts, we maintain flexibility to enable the exploration of new horizons.

Compassion: We aspire to centre compassion in all our work. We do this by noticing and listening within ourselves when anger, fear, panic, or insecurity may be influencing our thoughts or behaviours. And we invite others to similarly rest within their vulnerability. A shared effort to embody compassion warms and strengthens our hearts, offering an antidote to personal and collective trauma.

Curiosity: We seek to build comfort in the unknowing, letting go of the certainty the Western culture invites. We do not prescribe answers to specific scientific, technical, or policy matters. Instead, our aim is to provide spaces that forge creative conditions for exploration and collaboration.  We invite participatory, generative dialogue that is founded in kindness, curiosity, and truth-telling.

Inclusivity: We value and celebrate the spectrum of perceptions and ways of being that enrich our community and the world we inhabit. We are an anti-oppression community that aims to foreground silenced stories and marginalised voices, actively working to globalise our perspective to include, integrate, and foreground ‘othered’ histories, perspectives, and realities, especially from the the non-white, majority world, and places where collapse has long been unfolding and is ongoing, as a result of processes of colonisation, exploitation, and genocide.

Respect: We respect the sovereignty of all people and perspectives however they may be reacting to our predicament, and actively work to build our capacity to engage with opposing views. However, our stance is resolutely nonviolent. We favour persuasion over force, and reject any purported solutions which result in ‘othering’. Specifically, we condemn all authoritarian, fascist, or racist discourses and responses.

Belonging: We commit to bringing our whole selves to DAF spaces (both live and virtual) and to welcoming the whole of those we encounter in these spaces, without judgement.  We recognise that engaging with a diversity of perspectives and lived realities is helpful to our personal navigation and endeavour to remain open to these perspectives.  It is our intention to behave in ways that nurture profound & authentic relationships with others in our shared purpose.

Place: We recognise that this charter will only ever be abstract words on a screen unless we bring these principles and commitments into the places we live and work. We recognise the special importance of places where people are upholding regenerative cultural practices and respectfully stewarding ecosystems, and where collapse is already unfolding, and we materially support – with our money and our bodies – these places.

This is a ‘living charter’, which means it remains open to adjustment and refinement and will be reviewed every six months, enabling it to evolve in a way that reflects and incorporates the ways that our community grows.

If you would like to influence the way this charter evolves, you can do so by giving feedback here. Your feedback will be taken into account ahead of the next review period (December 2022).

If you would like to discuss behaviour in the Deep Adaptation Forum which you consider to be at odds with the terms of this charter, please get in touch with us to tell us more. You may also want to take a look at the Provisional DA Safety & Wellbeing Policy for details on what to do in the case of more serious incidents.