Our Values
We value honesty, openness, transparency and justice in the way we approach our strategy, funding and professional relationships as we strive on our learning journey to work towards anti-oppressive practices.
Our Accountability Structure
Currently, our funding structure is part of a wider family foundation, which means we are a subset of The Bernard Lewis Family Charitable Trust (BLFCT).
TPI is in a process of shifting grant decision making and stratergy focus within our grant making to a group of front-line activists who will have complete control of the grant giving process. These folks will also be paid for their time.
Up to this point, thoughtful and active accountability processes that considers different forms of power and access has been our primary focus.
Anti-oppressive framework
We commit to actively sharing our mistakes and learnings, especially with other White led organisations in the funding sector. We primarily do this through articles, public speaking and community organising. Our aim within this is to challenge ourselves and others to push back against white supremacy culture, in particular, ‘ the right to comfort’ ‘perfectionism’, ‘fear of open conflict’ and ‘either/or thinking’. That being said, it’s important to acknowledge that what we experience as our ‘mistakes’ and ‘learnings’ are also often deep harms we have inflicted on people of the global majority. We aknowledge the messiness and complexity of this journey.
Furthermore, we believe that accountability requires constant self reflection with personal emotional and somatic work to discover new ways to challenge how we continue to enable oppressive systems including but not limited to White supremacy. As a White person, I have found that accountability circles, praxis groups and the commitment to partaking in personal ongoing education in community with other White people to be particularly helpful. Below are some resources on the educators who guide me.
Social Justice Mediation Institute
(The below paragraph quotes extracts from AWARE- LA’s document ‘Alliance Building and Accountability’)
In order to do this, we strive to practice-
1) open communication, 2) deep dialogue, and 3) the acceptance that mistakes will occur
Moving beyond superficial, and therefore fragile relationships depends upon an approach to accountability that allows everyone to make mistakes, grow, and be challenged to further develop non-oppressive relational practices. We acknowledge that all of us have been raised within intertwining systems of oppression. The degree to which each of us takes up responsibility for investigating how they have affected us and remaining accountable to non-oppressive principles is what will help us build deep relationships that allow for each person to be fully human and also retain a focus on social justice work.
This work is in motion, and if you have further questions or feedback, please dont hesitate to reach out to connect on this.
Lily Lewis, Founder of TPI