As we prepare for the fifth cohort of Fifth Wave Labs, the Fifth Wave Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Advisory Council continues to strengthen the communal agreement and healing model to best support the individuals in our Fifth Wave community, through learning, iterating and testing. Through the value of diverse perspectives and with a goal to ensure feelings of safety from every community member, we will be stress testing our roadmap to mutual learning and relationship restoration.

In addition to knowing and stating our intersectional feminist core values, we continue to update our living community practice model to reflect the people, time and needs of the Fifth Wave community — guidelines to interactions are key to achieving a common understanding. We recognize the hows matter, for example:

How we wish to communicate with one another

How we want to treat everyone in the community

How we wish to grow one another

How we deal with harm

In our summer update, we broke down the steps for our roadmap to mutual learning and relationship restoration as we aimed to create safer spaces beyond the status quo (see model below). It’s against these steps to healing that we’ll be stress testing interpersonal scenarios, based on fact or fiction, that could occur within the Fifth Wave Community when perspectives and intersectionalities collide.

At the next Advisory Counci Meeting, we will use the scenarios to walk through how we might address healing and restoration using the “Living Communal Agreement Model” we have co-created to date. The purpose of this exercise is to test to what degree the model provides clarity of direction for the Fifth Wave community — and also to what degree it supports our goal of mutual, equitable community understanding and growth, in a variety of situations.

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