Vision
Our vision for PJALS: Everyday people are together advancing peace, racial equity, economic justice, and human rights through campaigns grounded in the intersections of these values.
Mission
Our mission is to engage everyday people to build a just and nonviolent world through community organizing and leadership development.
Organizational Culture
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- Movement for our mission
- Acknowledge and call upon shared humanity and shared interest for humanity: “opening us to the humanity of all while sharpening (not diminishing) our will to challenge and transform structural violence.”
- Shared analysis of power and structural oppression: people-power model
- Center the leadership of impacted people
- Change is fundamental
- Expand leadership and participation
- Expectation for learning and progress
- Take risks together for our values
- Share losses & victories
- Strong relationships, strong team
- Support self-care
- Conscious Use of Self
- Direct communication, constructive discussion; lead with recommendation
- Shared understanding of our values and approach to change: Peace, Action, Nonviolence, Justice, Movement-Building, Organizing
Values & Commitment
In our PJALS community, we believe everyday people can accomplish extraordinary things together. We strive to draw from our differences to increase and enhance effective action to build a just and nonviolent world. Our values ask us to honor and respect our web of different life experience to work collaboratively, sharing power and decision-making. Our work is led by people directly impacted by the problems we seek to address, both among our PJALS community and in our broader community and world. We recognize our shared humanity and commit in the following ways neither to harm a member nor to see a member harmed:
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- Use an intersectional racial equity lens in all our work.
- Call each other in, not out, when we make mistakes.
- Use decision-making processes that engage our diverse community.
Racial Equity Statement
PJALS strives to be a home where Spokane’s diverse communities find belonging as members and as staff to build power together. Our work is informed and fueled by our broad network of relationships, and shaped by a race-class analysis of the problems facing our greater community and world. We work to build a movement based in a moral consciousness for justice by opposing the interlocking systems of oppression and privilege. We are committed to dismantling White Supremacy in the community and in our organization. We enact our commitment to address race in pursuit of an anti-racist society, regardless of discomfort.
PJALS is emerging as a place where leaders of color and white anti-racist leaders build skills and power together – fueling racial justice and transformations both within PJALS and in the broader Spokane community.
We understand that racism has been used to divide our communities in the interest of power elites in our country and region. And so, we pursue an intersectional analysis of the challenges we face, by looking at the intertwining nature of race, class, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, and ability, as well as how we can act together for justice.
Therefore, PJALS is organizing the unorganized to build a multi-racial, intergenerational, all-gender, rural-urban, bottom-up movement led by impacted people for structural transformation.
The key for cross-racial solidarity, movement-building, and policy victories in Spokane County is addressing the connections between racism and economic hardship: PJALS tackles racism as a dehumanizing divide-and-conquer tactic that creates distrust, undermines social solidarity, and causes economic pain. PJALS uses a race-class analysis and narrative in our education, communications, and organizing in order to create a shared approach across our membership and regional movement.
In addition, PJALS is accountable to Black, Indigenous, people of color, low-income communities, religious minorities, and LGBTQ+ people through board and staff leadership, partnerships on shared issues, and by explicitly seeking direction and feedback from impacted members and other community leaders.
2024 – 2027 Strategic Goals: Executive Summary
Culture, Organizing, and Operations
“PJALS is a homegrown, grassroots, progressive organization that advances my values – the dignity, worth and value of all human beings; the restoration of the environment; advocacy for morally responsible government budget/spending; stopping war and funding for war; being anti-racist; holding government officials accountable for their oaths, etc.”
-PJALS member
Culture, Organizing, and Operations address our internal processes that shape our organizing work, which then drives policy impact.
Goal 1: Assess and build in accountability checks with regard to our impacted community partners and coalitions we are part of.
Goal 2: Ensure a shared understanding of how PJALS prioritizes organizing issues through our participatory member-driven process.
Goal 3: Model our values especially when it gets hard, through our Community Agreements, policies, and relationships.
Movement Building
“I believe in the mission of PJALS and that the work of this organization is one of the best chances we have at changing the systems in our society that continue to hurt and abandon marginalized communities.”
– PJALS Member
Goal 1: Build and engage the base of PJALS.
PJALS’ constituency is people in Spokane County and other areas of Eastern WA who are impacted by the issues we work on and those who share our values. Through concrete strategies and campaigns, more and more everyday people develop skills, consciousness, and relationships while increasing our collective power.
Goal 2: Build the base of the movement we are part of.
We recognize that PJALS is not the whole movement and that we need the whole movement. We nurture good, authentic relationships with partners and support other organizations in addition to building our own, with emphasis on supporting directly impacted communities.
Goal 3: Nurture grassroots organizers and leaders.
We support everyday people to emerge as leaders through the Young Activist Leaders Program; Building Organizing Leadership Development (BOLD); workshops on racial justice, nonviolent de-escalation skills, paid internships, and other strategies for grassroots activist education, engagement, and support.
Goal 4: Develop and strengthen an ecosystem of change with movement-wide shared language, values, analysis, and approach both internally and with our partners.
PJALS creates change by building the power of our movement (building with our base/community, not hero/savior/individual model), with a culture of belonging and language that centers members and community.
Goal 5: Work to create the conditions for peace with justice, connected in substantial ways with Trans-National Movements:
We are developing new ways to connect peace and anti-imperialism organizing with local organizing and racial justice. We are seeking and strengthening relationships with partners within and outside of the US in order to hear and respond to calls to action from communities directly impacted by US imperialism. We identify priority focus areas for our trans-national peace work against imperialism and US military intervention.
Organizational Sustainability
“The reason I’ve remained engaged with PJALS specifically is because it is a collective of community members with varying perspectives, and is largely intergenerational – This last part seems rare these days. It’s heartening to see people with both fresh and wise experiences coming together.”
– PJALS Member
Goal 1: Retain staff by living our values; increase staff capacity sustainably.
Goal 2: Prioritize wellbeing, relationships, and culture of belonging across our PJALS community through clear roles, quantitative and qualitative goals, member-centered communications, and activities to support connection.
Goal 3: Celebrate and preserve PJALS history before, during, and after celebrating our 50th anniversary in 2025.
Goal 4: Strengthen our leadership development pipeline, driven by strategic member engagement in committees, programs, volunteer leadership, work with partner organizations, and the Steering Committee.
Steering Committee membership is at least 50% people impacted by the issues we work on and no less than 30% BIPOC with intergenerational and cross-class diversity.
Goal 4: Sustain and increase funding capacity through sustaining member relationships, foundation support, and earned income.
Major Themes & Final Thoughts from PJALS Members
Solidarity means many things to many people but for PJALS it means:
“Ideally, solidarity means consistently dismantling systems of oppression that may exist within one’s self and appropriately challenging these systems inter-personally and institutionally in spaces where one has privileges.”
– PJALS Member
A ‘just future for all’ to PJALS and its members:
“A just future for all is one where we make a conscious and collective plan to intentionally and thoughtfully transition away from fossil fuels, build systemic racial/ economic/ gender/ disability/ queer justice, and create a world where people can thrive and heal and have supportive community. All of this must be done with those most impacted at the forefront of decision making. I think this means PJALS continues on with the BOLD Project, makes increasing space for those most impacted by the work, and continues being accountable and supportive of relationships with organizations across many issues; I also think it means building capacity organizationally; so much falls on so few, I hope that through BOLD and beyond we are able to build more engagement and support in active work.”
– PJALS Member
Finding Sustainability for Staff, Steering Committee members, and PJALS members:
“I wish that efforts of self-care and self-renewal for PJALS staff and volunteers were more transparent. This is long-haul work and it requires so much of people’s bodies and spirits. What life sustaining and cup-fulfilling activities are built into PJALS’ work?”
– PJALS Member
On Racial Equity:
“Racial Equity means being clear about expectations of white-bodied PJALS members and BIPOC members. It means calling out implicit and explicit bias and calling out spaces that might feel unsafe. It means creating environments where feedback is welcome and input is valued.”
-PJALS Member
Ultimate Hope for PJALS work:
“Restoration work: human, political, ecological.”
– PJALS Member