Introduction

All For One and One For All (the AFO-OFA)

We are a union, open to all, focused on helping each other and making our community better. Our purpose is to build trust and solidarity between our members with an eye toward serving the common good across lines of difference that must not divide us one from another.  We currently operate a Pay What You Like Store, a Community Resilience Center and a gym at Alive MMA/Athletic Fitness Woodstock), a junk removal company (Good Garbage), collective houses, an Accountability Group for Getting Unstuck (Warrior Counsel), and a Community Garden. We regularly help veterans coming back from war, people leaving abusive relationships, teens and adults facing homelessness, people turning their lives around, and ourselves as we face lives that can become lonely and meaningless in the absence of the sacred. We create the meaning we need by living lives of purpose together.

We support individual initiative and personal responsibility as we practice collective action to solve problems too big for any one of us. We respect the laws of the land even as we strive to be equal to a deeper sense of justice and fairness, far beyond that for which the laws call us to account.  We carry ourselves with a decent and humble humanity as a people with a place on this earth. We look out for each other and especially for the most vulnerable among us, because we all need each other, just as we all need the interconnected web of life.

We ground ourselves in practical projects, like helping each other secure work, housing, and transportation.  To the extent we can, we create jobs directly ourselves and support each other in earning our livelihoods, feeding ourselves, and providing for each other.  We also help our fellow workers employed by others to win respect, fair wages, concrete improvements in our everyday lives, helping people feel a sense of their own power, and changing the relations of power by ever strengthening our union.

We aim to help each other to a greater say in the decisions that affect us, proportional to the work we do and the contributions we make.  To this end we will support each other in our development as leaders who help make things better, and so come to be listened to and respected more fully.  We will advance and defend the practice of fair and responsible collective bargaining to bring more mindful and democratic accountability into our daily lives.  We respect the initiative and risks that leaders take, even as we rise to have our say and hope to influence decisions ourselves so that we may all be leaders. We stand together, and, when necessary, we will fight together as a union. In the overwhelming majority of circumstances, fighting will entail using our words. We teach and practice least force necessary, community based, self defense and lawful collective security. We are committed to looking out for each other and the common good. We encourage people of good will to become Peace Officers in law enforcement or to serve in the provision of our common defense. Our deepest thanks to all who serve and who have served. Let us get through this thing together.

Whenever possible, we will entrust decision making to those who do the work and make the contributions to realize those decisions, with a voice for all those the decision affects.  When we must, we may fall back on majority rule while respecting the rights of minority opinion and striving for consensus when possible.

We will encourage participation in electoral politics, especially at the precinct level, aiming to transform representational politics into direct participation and democratic engagement with our neighbors. Concretely, we encourage our members to become Precinct Committee People in the parties of their choice and to take the work of the union into our neighborhoods. Likewise will we encourage participation in Neighborhood Associations, Business Associations, other Labor Unions, Community Organizations, and the offices of self government. We understand that more gets done when we focus less on taking credit. We aim to be good friends to our friends and good neighbors to all, even as we see to our legitimate interests.

We aim to design each of our efforts to sustain and support itself as well as to generate a surplus for further efforts and unforeseen difficulties.  We aim not only to live within our means, individually and collectively, but also to have something more to contribute to the greater good, now and in the future. We recognize that frugality allows generosity, to ourselves, to each other, and in kindness to our neighbors.

We choose to adopt a special focus on community resilience and the capability of withstanding hard times.  We will strengthen our ties to the land and sea, without which we can neither eat nor survive at all. We will organize and support efforts to feed each other by means of the most sustainable hunting, gathering, farming, and fishing.  We will take on some of the work of producing and distributing food that honors the labor of those who bring it to us. We aim to create gathering places for healthy food and fellowship.  

We will help each other live in the most healthy and alive ways we can in the full vibrancy and authenticity of our individual selves.  We will build and support gyms, dances, and other places of fitness and community. We advance athletic and artistic excellence in ourselves and support it in each other as one part of the fullest expression of ourselves.  We embrace healthy and honorable competition and dare each other to bring our best selves forward.

We teach functional self defense to each other and in our larger community so that we can help people everywhere be free of violence.  We accept that a threat to any of us is a threat to all of us, and we take special responsibility to teach those of us who are most vulnerable so that we may all be more secure.  We also aim to teach the strongest among us, not only the means to defend ourselves with deadly force when we must, but also to employ the least force necessary to do our part to keep the peace.  To this end we will help those charged with enforcing laws and employed to provide security to discharge their responsibilities with the least risk of damage to themselves and others.  

We hope to open space in our lives to more easily live lives enriched by all kinds of art, culture, and good thinking, especially that which we do for ourselves and each other.  We may organize music, philosophy, recreation, art, and celebrations to realize our most alive selves. We aim to respect each other and support each other in our intellectual and artistic lives as well as our physical health.  We respect the dignity of all the work that simply needs doing, and we celebrate the journey of mastery inherent in all the most sacred work. In our work, disciplines, athletics, art, and actions we reveal who we truly are.

We aim to live honestly and accountably.  We must bring our words and our actions into integrity in order to become whole.  We will respect each other’s privacy and autonomy, but we will support each other to better keep our word and our agreements.  We aim to trust each other and to live trustworthy lives together. In this way we will further both freedom and the rootedness without which freedom is meaningless.  

Most of all we aim to really pay attention to each other and to live our lives as if we each matter, because we do. We will learn better to listen and attune to each other. We will learn to give our friends and relations the care we all deserve. We aim to consider each other and our effect on the world.  We hope to understand our unique times and to consider what is most called for now. We hope to be the kind of ancestors that those who come after us are proud to claim.

You are invited to join, show up, participate, and help make this Union real. Let us be a people with a place on this earth. Let us further the imagination that integrity and symbiosis can be what we are all about.