Social Justice Initiative

SJI Logo with Tagline: Co-Creating a More Just World for All

Vision Statement

Every individual, organization, and community will have equitable access to life-long resources required to reach their highest potential within a peaceful and just world.

Mission Statement

Co-create space and dedicate time for dialogue, reflection, relationship-building, and action to dismantle the structures and systems of injustice that perpetuate social inequities and disparities, honoring inherent interconnections and interdependencies.

Core Beliefs

  • All life is interconnected and deserves to be valued.

  • Everyone has the capacity to lead and be a teacher-learner.

  • Acts of injustice are learned behaviors.

  • The components of social justice can be taught, learned, embodied, and enacted within and among individuals and communities.

  • Healing and reconciliation within and among individuals and communities are steps on a journey toward liberation from vengeance, violence, destruction, and turmoil.

Four Pathways to Justice

These four pathways are most powerful when used together to activate socially-just individuals, families, organizations, communities, and policies. They are all active processes, not end states. Each pathway requires that we avoid passivity and are active participants in Life. Collectively, these pathways urge risk-taking with intention, and genuinely seeking connections within, between, and among individuals and others. 

The Social Justice Initiative pathways are defined as follows:

  • Forgiveness: Acknowledging injustices as we transform from identifying as victim to identifying as survivor and from perpetuating harm to practicing social justice

  • Cultural Humility: Remaining grounded in our own unknowing as we continue to come to know others

  • Courage and Compassion: Facing fear and choosing to move forward anyway, and commitment to remaining desirous of supporting others though suffering

  • Radical Love: Recognizing the Good in others simply because they exist

 

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Contact Us

Social Justice Initiative

Darlyne Bailey, Ph.D.

Founder & Executive Director of the Social Justice Initiative

Katherine E. McBride Professor Emeritus & Dean Emeritus of the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research
Email: sji@brynmawr.edu
Phone: 610-526-5180