Community Agreements: What are they? Why are they useful?

Community Agreements help provide a framework and parameters for engaging in dialogue that allows you to establish a shared sense of intention ahead of engaging in discussion. Community Agreements can be co-constructed and creating them can be used as an opening activity that your group collectively and collaboratively undertakes ahead of engaging in dialogue. Here is a model of Community Agreements you can review. As the facilitator, you can gauge how long your group should take to form these agreements or if participants would be amenable to pre-established community agreements.

Opening Activity (Optional): Establishing Community Agreements for Discussion

Whether you are a group of people coming together once for this screening and discussion, or a group that knows each other well, creating a set of community agreements helps foster clear discussion in a manner that draws in and respects all participants, especially when tackling intimate or complex conversations around identity. These steps will help provide guidelines for the process:

• Pass around sample community agreements and take time to read aloud as a group to make sure all participants can both hear and read the text.
• Allow time for clarifying questions; make sure all understand the purpose of making a set of agreements and allow time to make sure everyone understands the agreements themselves.
• Go around in a circle and have every participant name an agreement they would like to include. Chart this in front of the room where all can see.
• Go around 2-3 times to give participants multiple chances to contribute and to also give a conclusive end to the process.
• Read the list aloud.
• Invite questions or revisions.
• Ask if all are satisfied with the list.
• Ask all participants to sign the list of agreements. Leave it where all can see. As the facilitator, be mindful of the agreements throughout your session, noting if someone speaks or acts in a way that runs counter to them.

Grounding in the Past & Present

Histories of colonization and American Slavery are deeply intertwined as are their enduring structures. While the experiences of settler colonialism and chattel slavery are unique to place, peoples, and communities, we all inherit and hold different relationships to this inheritance. We must recognize this past and its ongoing human, environmental, and structural implications in order to commit to change. We encourage your community to openly acknowledge the legacy and inheritance of both and open this discussion with aLand Acknowledgment.

What is a Land Acknowledgment?*

Land acknowledgments do not exist in the past tense, but rather recognize that colonialism is a current and ongoing process with enduring structures. Land acknowledgments are a way to combat systemic erasure and honor the traditional indigenous inhabitants of the land you are currently living on, to offer respect, and to support larger truth-telling and reconciliation efforts. Acknowledgement is a small gesture that must be accompanied by continued education, action and commitments to justice and repair. Here are some resources to learn more about Land Acknowledgments:Native Land Resources,

To discover and learn about the Indigenous Territories you currently inhabit you can:

1. Visithttps://native-land.ca/to see a visual representation and learn more
2. Text your zip code to (855)-917-5263
   
   

Land Acknowledgment Model:

I/We acknowledge that today we gather as [name of your community/group] on the unceded Indigenous lands of Turtle Island, the ancestral name for what is now called North America. Specifically, I/We acknowledge the unceded territory of the [indigenous community/communities local to your zip code] past and present; as well as all the American Indian and Indigenous Peoples and communities who have been or have become a part of these lands and territories in [your state]. We honor, with gratitude, the land itself and the people who have stewarded and lived in relation to this land across generations.