realife's values
Most organisations list values they hope to live up to. realife's five are working tools: the first filter every partnership passes through before fit or finance is considered, the things that shape how money is spent and how the collective is run. In this we become well versed at parity in pay and taxation across our global operations. They each cost something, in time, in money, in work declined, and that cost is how you know they are real.
Courage
It takes courage to challenge oppressive systems, to face ecological-social problems that can seem insurmountable, and to keep working toward change anyway. Courage is what lets realife take the necessary, sometimes risky, actions that justice asks for, and to decline the work that would compromise the rest of these values.
Care
Courage does not mean abandoning care. It calls for compassionate care within the collective and in every relationship beyond it, which takes real intention and labour. Care is how realife recognises the undervalued and invisibilised work that everything depends on, and keeps its actions humane enough to build the trust collaboration rests on.
Collaboration
Care-ful work means working with communities, partners and stakeholders rather than for them. Solutions are co-created through learning together, because justice is only ever reached through collective action, never delivered to people from outside.
Accountability
Courage also means holding power to account, and speaking to it. Collaboration asks the same of realife itself: to be transparent in what it does, and answerable, to the people its work is meant to serve and to its partners, not only to those who fund it.
Justice
Justice is the value that holds the other four together, and the point of all of them. For realife it means ecological-social justice placed at the core of every piece of work: balancing power, and contributing to equity, inside the collective as much as beyond it.