Our Manifesto
What if we remembered every day how powerful we are?
What if we remembered why and how we were going to use that power?
What if we chose to use that power to heal ourselves, heal our relationships, heal our community, and be in a true relationship with our planet?
What if we chose to use our power to love, and we remembered how powerful that is?
What if we remembered everyday how powerful we are?
radical vision
Create and nurture community coalitions in third spaces addressing community-identified needs by integrating liberatory education through restorative justice, transformative justice, and healing justice
Our unlearning of oppression requires us to choose transformation in ourselves while we create justice together. This will involve:
Learning how to cultivate personal and interpersonal critical consciousness for discernment of truth
Expanding, transmuting, and dismantling perspectives and behaviors which perpetuate harm
Integrating and embodying our core values which center our collective healing and liberation.
DIVINE MISSION
Activate and cultivate third spaces for liberatory education across communities of practice focused on restorative justice, transformative justice, and healing justice, where our work is to “learn to unlearn, unlearn to learn” in the following ways:
To learn how to be in a healing relationship with all parts of ourselves, as we unlearn ways we were taught to abandon ourselves.
To learn how to integrate shared core values of liberation in ourselves and our relationships; so that we may unlearn ideologies, practices, and norms which perpetuate oppression in all forms.
To learn how to be responsible for the liberation of our minds, bodies, spirit, and planet in joyous, balanced, and harmonious community-centered ways; as we unlearn to heal the ways we have been subjugated, exploited, enslaved, and oppressed.
my own educational journey involved recognizing how much my own learning process requires an unlearning journey.
— Maio Buenafe, visionary for the unlearning community school
As a cultural and political educator, scholar, and intergenerational mentor since 2007, so many of my students, mentees, and community members throughout the decades have expressed to me that they are ready to unlearn this societal conditioning of self-abandonment and assimilation, and aspire to learn for the sake of loving to learn. The Unlearning Community School was built to be a liberatory space of learning and unlearning together to cultivate radical transformation in ourselves and the world.
OUR CORE VALUES
OPENNESS
Curiosity, a love for truth, knowledge, and learning
Humility through compassion, grace, & humor
ACCOUNTABILITY
A worldview that is holistic and expansive
“the no makes way for the yes”, Sees within the limitation is the opportunity
Sovereignty
To stand on business; don’t just tell us, SHOW us
Respect yours and others’ responsibilities
MULTIDIMENSIONALITY
To honor and uphold self-determination, free will, agency, autonomy, and collective self-governance