What are your top ten “commandments” for participating in community? What are the promises that should hold between any individual and the rest of the community members? Here’s what we came up with for our Makom Community Brit this year(not necessarily in order of importance):
- We love everyone in the best way we can.
- We show gratitude.
- We get to be ourselves.
- Mistakes: make them, don’t copy them, and apologize for them.
- We speak with truth.
- We help everyone get what they need.
- We listen and respond respectfully to each other’s ideas.
- We all help clean up.
- We are good listeners.
- We help keep each other’s feelings and bodies safe.
We want to share with you a bit of the process that we went through to agree on this list. Here are three pieces of the conversation that we had about the ideas on our brit. The first one is a discussion about possibly adding another item to the list and ultimately determining that it was already included in other parts of the brit.
Student 1: We should add, “We use kind words.”
Student 2: Our brit already says that we speak the truth, so we don’t need to add something about also using kind words.
Teacher: Maybe the truth isn’t always kind. How do we do both? Let’s keep thinking about that one.
Student 3: This list says “we respond respectfully.” Being kind is part of being respectful.
Student 4: “We love everyone in the best way we can” includes using kind words. Using kind words is one way we can do that.
Student 5: The brit says that “we help keep each other’s bodies safe.” If that also includes feelings, then that would entail using kind words. Using kind words is a way we can help keep each other’s feelings safe.
Teacher: Let’s add “feelings” to that idea.
The next two snippets of conversation are discussions we had about what it practically looks like to do some of the ideas from our brit on a day-to-day basis at Makom Community.
How do we implement “We love everyone in the best way we can?”
- We don’t hurt people (bodies or feelings) on purpose.
- We include everyone.
- Almost everything else on the brit is included in this one! Most of the other ideas are ways that we can love everyone. That should be Makom’s tagline!
How do we get to be ourselves?
- We don’t boss other people around.
- We don’t have to copy what someone else is doing – you do what you want to do.
- We don’t make mistakes on purpose to help us be the best version of ourselves.