About
The Washington Community Rights Network is about changing the way we live with one another and place. What do we mean by that? Through awareness, education, and action the “change” is about moving communities towards the creation of viable social and economic systems in connection and balance with the natural environment and away from the dominant system of today which operates in the opposite. Building community, understanding the true intent and function of the dominant system, and standing up to do something about it (yes, the system we have today is not working) are all central to community rights.
We know it’s a big undertaking with numerous obstacles in the way, but when you know something is just plain wrong, you can’t not do something about it. For the WACRN making the possible probable is about generating awareness, educating, and then activating
Awareness
The WACRN is all about providing information, background, and possibilities on several critical topics – rights of nature, local self-government, and corporate privilege.
Education
When the WACRN is effective with its awareness efforts this often leads to people wanting to learn more about the structure of government, culture change, movement building, rights of nature, and local self-determination and so we are here to help.
Action
The WACRN sees the necessity and benefit of awareness and education but only as it feeds into taking substantive action – building community resilience, confronting corporate harms, and changing governmental systems.
WACRN Mission Statement
Understandings:
We, the members of the Washington Community Rights Network, undertake our work with the following understandings:
Citizens of the biosphere are urgently seeking to address ecological collapse and climate chaos. The health and survival of all living beings is in jeopardy as natural systems continue to be disrupted and destroyed.
Existing systems of governance and the current structures of law perpetuate gross economic disparity, elevating commerce over community. Nature is exploitable, and people are expendable.
We live in a time of systemic inequalities: racial injustice; marginalization of and violence against indigenous peoples; the perpetuation of America’s settler-colonial culture; and the continued belief that Nature is property.
Corporate power continues to usurp and corrupt true democratic processes, override individual civil liberties, and exploit communities.
In the face of these forces we recognize the need to embrace local democracy, to reinvigorate the public sphere and civic engagement, and to respond to the will of the people in order to directly challenge the existing system.
Stories and cultural paradigms around private property, agency, and disempowerment must be transformed through the development and evolution of new languages that describes and gives voice to a community consciousness to support and extend our mission and the greater movement.
Now, therefore, we resolve as follows:
Mission Statement:
With the failure of existing governments to represent the will of the people, and in response to the urgency of climate and ecological crises, the WACRN educates, connects, and empowers communities in the pursuit of local self-determination to create new structures that protect the inherent rights of nature’s living systems, human and non-human, to equitably exist, regenerate, and flourish with each other.