S.O.N.G.

SOUTHERNERS ON NEW GROUND (SONG)

VISION
SONG envisions a sustainable South that embodies the best of its freedom traditions and works towards the transformation of our economic, social, spiritual, and political relationships. We envision a multi-issue southern justice movement that unites us across class, age, race, ability, gender, immigration status, and sexuality; a movement in which LGBTQ people – poor and working class, immigrant, people of color, rural – take our rightful place as leaders shaping our region’s legacy and future. We are committed to restoring a way of being that recognizes our collective humanity and dependence on the Earth.

MISSION
SONG is a home for LGBTQ liberation across all lines of race, class, abilities, age, culture, gender, and sexuality in the South. We build, sustain, and connect a southern regional base of LBGTQ people in order to transform the region through strategic projects and campaigns developed in response to the current conditions in our communities. SONG builds this movement through leadership development, intersectional analysis, and organizing.

CORE VALUES
SONG is about transformation: transforming our communities, the world, and ourselves. The vision for this transformation, and its resulting programmatic work, is shaped by SONG’s core values. SONG views the following shared values as crucial to doing its work.

Relationship Values: Personal relationships based on trust are fundamental in creating change and building movement in hostile environments. Creating, re-building and sustaining a deep level of trust requires a commitment to honesty, integrity, transparency, and accountability. We also strive to take care of each other by demonstrating kindness, compassion, joy, and resiliency.
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Work Values: SONG understands the intersections of oppression and works for collective liberation of all oppressed peoples. SONG centers people with lived experience and commits to helping them work toward justice and dignity. In doing this work, SONG also commits to anti-oppression work, collective direction, self-care, discipline and respect. SONG lifts up the South as a vibrant political base and prioritizes those communities that have historically been both marginalized and been the backbone of resistance and liberation work in the South, including people of color and rural communities.

Spiritual Values: SONG believes in people’s right to bring their whole selves into any given space and work towards healing the brokenness resulting from living compartmentalized lives. SONG holds up joy, creativity, compassion, connectedness to earth, and a commitment to something greater than our individual selves as integral to spiritual survival.

ESSENTIAL CONCEPTS OF SONG:
• Whole selves: SONG creates spaces in which all of a person’s identities are honored and affirmed – no one is asked to prioritize one over the other, and no one is left behind. We believe in building, renewing, and supporting Southern activists.

• Self-determination: SONG creates spaces in which people can grow and be challenged, and are expected to strive to be their best whole selves. SONG expects that members will not hinder the self-determination of others through acts of racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, hatred, and intolerance.

• Member-driven: SONG’s commitment is to its members. We want to strengthen members’ skills and help them build connections with each other.

• Connection: SONG brings people together so that they can overcome feelings of isolation and organize with others who share the same worldview. SONG connects groups in the South who are doing similar work. SONG sees the interconnections between different systems of oppression. SONG also connects the experience of Southerners to global conditions, and trains people to see the connections between the conditions of their individual lives and larger systems.

• Vision: SONG is visionary, not reactionary. SONG organizes for hope, not in response to fear. We build, connect, and sustain a kind of organizing that is not limited by the boundaries of race, class, culture, gender and sexuality; an organizing that amplifies hopes and dreams of transformation to a better world. We organize to build the world we really want to live in.