Values Statement

This statement of our community values-- which was also created through our community values-- began in 2014 with a collaborative brainstorm at our sister conference, Spring.

A member of our community made a posterboard with the questions, “What makes [this conference] what it is?” and, “What are the core elements of [this conference]?” Conference attendees were then invited to contribute their responses on anonymous post-it notes. We have synthesized these responses into a comprehensive statement of our values. We see this as a starting place for a conversation about the values of our larger community.

Although not every individual community member shares every other member’s assessment of the conference’s “core values,” we have chosen to use the word “we” throughout our summary to create an integrated values statement which represents the varied perspectives of our diverse community. We begin with an overview, followed by a longer synthesis which quotes the actual words community members used.

Summary

Sputnik is a space for building community, exploring and deepening our relationships with others and ourselves, creating opportunities for play and creativity, challenging social and personal norms, breaking the routines of everyday life, and discovering revolutionary ways of being together. Our values are centered around bringing out our full humanity through connecting, challenging, laughing, crying, playing, and working together for three days.

We do this through leading or participating in peer-led workshops, playing games, sharing our talents and skills, checking-in with each other in small groups, doing chores, and having deep discussions and conversations.

In coming together to build community, we also hope to find emotional groundedness, energy, and motivation to change things in our lives and beyond. We work to practice supportive listening with each other and continuously seek to learn and understand more about each other, ourselves, and the world around us, even when it feels challenging.

Full Synthesis

Personal Interconnection and Community Building

Two of our core values are personal interconnection and the making of community. We believe in the significance of “multiple different sorts of opportunities for dynamic, playful ... connections with other people,” including “small groups, checking in,” “singing together,” “working together prepping meals, cleaning, picking up, doing what needs to get done,” “friends, good food, health, happiness,” and “cuddles.” Taken together, these instances of connection serve as an “inspiring example of what relationship and community CAN look like.”

Deeper and More Rewarding Human Relationships

The community we are working to build is grounded in deeper, more challenging, and more rewarding human relationships, “a place to get back in touch with the true nature of relationship - to self, to place, to others, to service, to nature.” We recognize that creating meaningful relationships can be hard work, and we value “holding a space for connection, even when that's inconvenient and boring sometimes” and “listening without ‘fixing’ or advising or talking about yourself - actively trying to learn and understand more.” We depend on each other to “[help] each of us see our best selves, and [hold] us if we fall short at times.” We are creating “community for community's sake. Which gives us the emotional groundedness, energy and motivation to change things in our lives and beyond.”

Challenging Personal and Social Norms

These deep, meaningful relationships help us sustain “a willingness to engage with hard questions, patterns, feelings together,” both personally and socially. Through this work, we create “a place - and a way in and of itself - to challenge cultural norms” and “a place to healthily push [our] limits - and to healthily hold [our] boundaries.” One way we challenge these norms is through “non-normative relationship models,” which includes questioning “what it means to be in a relationship with another person, including whether or not we really need to distinguish between sexual partners and non-sexual friends.” Another we challenge norms is by redefining the notion of expert in our “workshops,” where we focus on “sharing skills and activities,” and in our “peer relationships,” where “we are the ‘experts’ when it comes to supporting one another.” This challenge also extends to the “ability to be self-reflective and challenge our own structures as a group.”

Integrity and Emotional Safety

One thing which enables the hard work of building meaningful relationships is a commitment to integrity and each others’ safety. Our values include “honesty,” “emotional safety,” and “letting go of emotional armory.” Our commitment to creating a space where “feelings are valued” enables multiple types of safety: both “not caring that you can't spell and writing anyways” and also “safe(r) space from which to challenge assumptions.” We are building a “place where thoughtful weirdos want to come. And not feel constrained.”

Breaking the Routines of Everyday Life

Another way we create space for meaningful connection is by breaking away from the numbing routines of everyday life. We take “a break from cell phones, email, the Internet - a rare technology-light week” and foster “a different relationship to time.” Instead of preoccupying and isolating ourselves, we focus on “holding a space, instead of rushing to fill it - with talk, distraction, addictions” while “living in close proximity.” By holding this space, we hope to remake our everyday relationship to the world, making room for “reverence” and “work as worship”-- not in the usual religious sense of those words, but in the sense of a reverence for each other and the world which we create through our shared labor.

Play

The value of joyful, ridiculous, self-revelatory play is also crucial to our creation of this space. We especially appreciate “HUMOR!” and “IRREVERENCE”: “a space to laugh about ugly shit” and “an emotional release in all that humor we share.” Play also allows us to “[show] ourselves through art, humor, and creativity (like at coffee house!).”