Sanctuary Values People
In a world where people are increasingly reduced to quanta of data used to create performance-oriented statistics that reduce people to human capital or human waste, Sanctuary values people as people.Â
Sanctuary refuses to believe that a person is more or less valuable because they are housed or forcibly deprived of housing. Sanctuary rejects the proposition that a person is more or less valuable because of the money they have hoarded or had taken from them. Sanctuary gives no credence to the argument that a person is more or less valuable if they receive their medications from a family doctor or from an ad hoc street-pharmacist. Sanctuary does not believe that the person who experiences inner peace has any more inherent dignity than the person who shows outward signs of distress. And Sanctuary absolutely refuses to believe that a person is more or less valuable depending on if they have been praised or criminalized by the government, the judicial system, the nonprofit sector, or the healthcare industry. Sanctuary values people as people.
Sanctuary Values Relationships
People exist in and through relationships with other people. In these relationships, we communicate to one another how and why we do or do not value each other. Because we value people, Sanctuary values relationships. Because all relationships are messy, all humans are fallible, and sometimes even the best intentions cause harm, valuing people thoughtfully and well means that we value certain kinds of relationships more than other kinds.
At Sanctuary, we value relationships that honour and nurture the agency, wisdom, strength, and power that all people (ourselves included!) already have within them. We value the formation of horizontal relationships of mutual care and mutual respect, over relationships that are oriented around institutional hierarchies of power. Rather than viewing power as something we share with others who do not have power, we believe that all people already have power which should be acknowledged, nurtured, celebrated, and grown. Instead of paternalistic or condescending models of charity, we recognize that our own wellness is inextricably linked to the wellness of those whom we serve. We value solidarity over charity, and journeying alongside of others rather than telling them where to go or what to do.
At Sanctuary, we value relationships that foster a sense of belonging, encourage the creation of mutual trust, spark joy, and assist us with finding home together. We are gentle with those who have been greatly harmed by others and firm in our boundaries with those who would cause great harm to others—while also affirming that our well-seasoned and intersectional perspective means recognizing that many people simultaneously experience harm and cause harm. Valuing people as people and valuing relationships with people means starting from this recognition and then collectively, creatively, and dynamically engaging in the work of home-building.
Sanctuary Values Mutual Care and Mutually Liberating Solidarity
As Sanctuary, we recognize the realities of oppression, colonization, gendered, racial, and heteronormative violence, intergenerational trauma, religious abuse, and the ongoing impoverishment of more and more people in order to make a tiny number of people extremely rich. We are a community of some of the people who have been most harmed by these forms of systemic, structural, historical, and contemporary violence. Consequently, at Sanctuary we value relationships that are tender-hearted, understanding, liberatory, honest, therapeutic, caring, and resourceful. We practice mutual care as the pathway to mutually liberating solidarity. In this way, everyone of us, especially the most abandoned and oppressed who are the centre of the Sanctuary community, can participate joyfully, meaningfully, and freely in the great abundance of life that has been given to us all.