To create anything radical it must be accessible
We strive to create spaces with vetted people we trust that feel safer and accessible to people. All of our events provide NOTAFLOF and free tickets. Everything we create is open source, but please give us credit. Some people not be a good fit for Nexus. This community is for people who are willing to take accountability for their actions, support others in fully expressing themselves, the ability to understand their own actions with a reasonable awareness of how they might impact others, and feel aligned with our community agreements. We respond to incident reports nationally for socially impactful situations as well as discrimination, aggression, oppression, and consent violations. We believe in a holistic approach to community development and recognize that the world outside of our community impacts Nexus members and we will do what we can to support them.
We are creating spaces and experiences where we as a community can express ourselves fully and create the things we want to see more of in the world. We see so many beautiful, unique, and amazing things created within Nexus. Through all of this there is more possibility of what can happen here than most other realms of the world and that can be really hard or scary sometimes. Our community is not devoid of harm, but we do everything we can to reduce it and restore our community through healing processes when harm happens. We strongly believe we have created the container of this community in such a way where everyone in our community can express themselves fully. We strongly encourage everyone to read through all of our agreements before making a decision on whether or not to apply and we fully expect everyone within our community to reasonably follow our community agreements to the best of our ability.
Highlighted Harm Reduction Community Agreemetns
Expression and Support Framework
At its best expression is the authentic manifestation of an individual’s attunement to their body, emotions, mentality, and intentions. Support is a collaborative effort between two or more people to provide confidence or comfort with the intent to help someone achieve desired goals.
Expression and support must be:
- Intentional When expressing ourselves or supporting others, it is important to understand our reasoning for our actions. Act mindfully, paying attention to the potential impact of our action.
- Consensual This means following community agreements and frameworks, providing feedback after somebody has agreed to hear it, and asking for the support that you need.
- Authentic These spaces are a space to take off the mask. Give yourself the opportunity to grow by showing up in a way that may be uncomfortable but desirable. That desire may be to relax and find comfort where you couldn’t before. It is our belief that when we are truly authentic in our expression and support we would not choose to harm others.
- Accountable A form of supporting each other, ourselves, and our communities is through introspection and processing of our expression. When we participate in community our actions and the actions of other community members should stand up to a relatively reasonable amount of reflection around whether or not something harmed someone. This accountability is supportive, collaborative, respectful, and consensual.
- Secure Expression and support needs to be free from fear and secure. When we express ourselves we deserve to feel free from aggression, oppression, and discrimination, most importantly within ourselves. We deserve to support ourselves, our community, and our beliefs openly and securely.
Thank You! Bonk! Ouch
This is for situations where we feel safe enough to speak up and name when somebody has done something you have interpreted as either kind, harmful, painful, or uncomfortable. Think Red, Yellow, Green as a consent safeword check-in.
Thank you - when you feel somebody has said something kind about your identity.
Bonk definition - When somebody, in good faith, says or does something painful or uncomfortable when trying to connect with us.
Ouch definition - When somebody says something harmful unintentionally.
Identifying Harm Vs Pain
The following is provided as a non-exhaustive list of actions and behaviors that often constitute harm and would require accountability and repair-oriented processes.
As a member of the Beyond Community we will not encourage or celebrate the harm of others.
Harm vs Pain
For the purposes of these community agreements harm and pain are defined as:
Harm is done when somebody does damage by carelessly breaking boundaries and/or agreements that they should have been reasonably aware of regardless of intention.
Pain happens when there is suffering caused even though everyone operates in good faith and within a reasonable awareness of boundaries and agreements.
Discomfort A feeling of unease that can occur independently of pain or harm being done.