As lawyers and legal workers committed to transformation and building the power of community led movements we are grounded and accountable to a set of politics and values. The below values serve both as guideposts and as a litmus test to help us determine our work and evaluate it.

VALUES

• We believe in using the law for the people and that legal tools should be used to build the power of movements.

• We are committed to liberation and self-determination of all Black people -- including Black women and LGBTQIA folks.

• We hold ourselves accountable to support movements for Black liberation including organic uprisings.This means following the leadership of movement organizers and taking direction and feedback from our partners. 

• We are political. We understand that this work requires political lawyering and explicit partnership with movement activists/organizers. 

• We strive to think creatively and collectively about how the law can be used to support movements while respecting activists’ and organizers’ political choices. 

• We are unapologetically committed to developing and following the leadership of Black people within the law. 

• We believe in the importance and necessity of an agile and radical legal infrastructure that supports liberation movements. 

• We believe in actively combatting the elitism, hierarchies and lawyer-centric tendencies within the legal world. 

• We believe in an internationalist approach that draws connections between the struggle for human rights and dignity in Black communities in the United States and across the globe. 

• We are committed to continued growth and in the words of Mary Hooks we are willing and ready to be transformed in service of the work. 

• We believe in creating a space that is affirming, healing, transparent,and respectful. We work to ensure that those spaces don’t replicate the kinds of oppression, harm and trauma that we are working against.