VALUES

One cannot truly exist without the other. Our ideas of justice are rooted in the Luo indigenous understandings of holistic community justice, in which victims and offenders are reconciled and social wrongs are made right through concrete action. Our perspective on peace is similarly holistic; it is not the absence of violence, but the total liberation from oppression and the restoration of all things.

The cycle of dependency, largely perpetuated unintentionally through goodwill, has allowed longstanding issues of poverty, hunger, poor public health, and the like to become all the more rampant. Although we appreciate the efforts of several NGOs and relief agencies, we heed the words of the great African author Chinua Achebe: "The real solutions lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary." Handing out food may solve hunger briefly, but promoting land access through nonviolent change is much more helpful. (In other words, don't just build a school - allow the most vulnerable to have the opportunity of contextualized education.)

Making the wrongs of this world right is dirty work, because it deals with dirty systems that are often protected by dirty people. We recognize that systemic change will not occur without engaging social, political, ecological, cultural, economic, and international factors and redistributing the power associated with these factors.