ABOUT COURAGEOUS CONVERSATIONS
WHAT IS COURAGEOUS CONVERSATIONS?
Courageous Conversations Towards Racial Justice is a dialogue-centered initiative on racism and privilege, designed to address racial healing, equity, and justice in our community.
Through dialogues, workshops, events, study groups, and collaborations, the Courageous Conversations leadership team, in partnership with the Milton Interfaith Clergy Association, brings together a diverse group of people representing a wide array of life experiences, circumstances, and choices.
MISSION STATEMENT
We believe that racism impacts all of us and operates in our community, country, and world on a personal and systemic level.
Through dialogues, workshops, events, study groups, and collaborations on race and privilege, we hope to build a movement in which we hold ourselves and one another accountable to understanding and transforming deep rooted attitudes and behaviors in order to end systems of white supremacy and racism, recognizing the intersectionality of other social oppressions.
We believe this movement will be fostered through the hard work of personal transformation in an individual, interpersonal, and communal context.
THEORY OF CHANGE
Deep, authentic community is formed when we recognize our shared humanity through a commitment to dismantling systems of power in which some lives are systematically valued and protected above others.
We believe that within such a community, we can build mutually respectful, trusting relationships through which we will work together to take moral action toward dismantling racism in our lives, families, homes, and communities.
The Courageous Conversations Toward Racial Justice program was created on the principle that racism impacts all of us. We recognize that understanding, interrupting, and dismantling internal and external racism is lifelong work. It cannot just be achieved by a series of seminars.
INTERPERSONAL
Engagement with and relationships with people across various lines of difference is an essential element of this work. As we come to know one another we will recognize the inherent dignity within each of us, find common ground, and learn from one another in trusting, authentic community.
INDIVIDUAL
This work must begin on an individual level with personal reflection and growth. We must develop an awareness about what racism is and how it impacts us personally, interpersonally, and communally. We must educate ourselves in order to recognize how implicit bias and racism works within us before we can understand how it works within the world, and how we can engage the world in a different way.
COMMUNAL
We have a duty to understand how racism operates in our own communities and how we can leverage our skills, talents and vision to address inequities on the communal level. The more we become aware of the systems that oppress people, the more we are able to cooperatively dismantle them.