Creating a Safer Community Spaces Toolkit
Everyone who works with or has attended the Internet Freedom Festival is aware of our commitment to building safer community spaces. We have gone through many learning experiences that have shaped our processes and strategies to support this vision, and we have offered one-on-one consulting to many other community organizers who reached out to us for our help. But the recent conversations and initiatives about the urgency and importance of protecting our spaces reinforce one idea:
To protect our spaces we need to provide community organizers with professional tools and strategies.
As community organizers, we know very well the pressure that is put on us. Organizing groups of people — particularly politically active, culturally different and passionate ones — is a real challenge. Community organizers in the Internet freedom spaces have been long facing it without good methodologies, guides, professional resources or standardized best practices.
We can’t keep sharing the little information that we may have in closed circles. We need to turn conversations into actions. We need to work with experts to create professional tools and methodologies, and we need make them available for everyone.
The Safer Community Spaces Toolkit
The Safer Community Spaces Toolkit for community organizers and event designers is a practical guide with all the professional materials we wished we had when we first started working with communities. This curated manual is the product of years of community experience, combined with the expertise of seasoned professionals in gender, diversity, inclusivity, psychology, conflict-resolution and group dynamics.
The Safer Community Spaces Toolkit will include:
Best practices, strategies, methods, processes and decision trees: The core of the community organizer’s work! Examples:
- Why do you need a code of conduct?
- Setting up a code of conduct committee
- Strategies to enforce the code of conduct
- When to contact an expert
Self-assessment checklists: Necessary to make sure you don’t miss any key components affecting the safety of your spaces. An essential part of this will be the Safer Spaces Index, a list of indicators that will help organizers determine the safety of their spaces.
Case studies and common scenarios: Because we have learned a lot by doing (and by failing). Examples:
- Someone that wasn’t invited showed up
- There’s been code of conduct violation in your mailing list
Template documents: Life is better when you can just copy and paste. Examples:
- Code of conduct violation evaluation sheet
- Language for common responses
Additional professional resources: we want to offer as many additional resources as possible on gender, diversity, inclusivity, psychology, conflict-resolution and group dynamics, all suggested by the professionals working with us.
We are are still learning, and there is much more that needs to be done. For us, the Safer Community Spaces Toolkit is a practical, proactive approach, aiming to fix one very specific aspect of a big and complex problem. This toolkit will help community organizers create safer spaces, but won’t make a space safe just by itself.
Where to get the Safer Community Spaces Toolkit
The Safer Community Spaces Toolkit is now under development and will be presented at the Internet Freedom Festival in March 2018. There will be materials and pre-release copies shared ahead of time with selected individuals and organizations.
If you wish to get an advance copy and/or get involved in the design process, or you have a tool, strategy or process you think we should include in the toolkit, you may contact us through our team email.
