Through a network of educational institutions and community organizations, the Community-based Global Learning Collaborative advances advances community-based global learning and research for more just, inclusive, and sustainable communities.

By signing below, I commit myself to following Fair Trade Learning principles as strategic areas of effort that advance this broader mission. These principles require me to work toward partnerships that exhibit:

• Common purposes: Partners including un-affiliated community members, community organizations, and educational institutions share common vision(s) at the intersection of education and community-building.

• Leadership from those who are most affected: Through teaching, research, and project development, systematic efforts are made to raise the voices, questions, insights, and leadership of individuals most affected by dominant discourses and project interventions.

• Protections for members of vulnerable populations: I will not engage in short-term volunteering in orphanages or residential care centers for vulnerable children, nor will I engage in any form of medical or professional volunteering that I am not qualified to do in my home country setting. Across settings, I commit to doing all that I can to ensure systematic protections for individuals in vulnerable populations.
 
• Participation opportunities among those who are most effected: Particularly in respect to educational programs designed to teach about a place or issue in a specific place, I will make efforts to ensure that individuals from that place have opportunities to participate, though invitation, credentialing opportunities, scholarships, or some combination thereof.

• Consciousness and evaluation efforts regarding theories of change: Recognizing that community-based global learning often simultaneously seek goals regarding both participant learning and external community outcomes, I take steps to clarify theories of change and to evaluate activities in light of those theories.

• Ethical representation: I review our materials to ensure that efforts to represent our programming serve an educative function, avoiding reliance on simplistic stereotypes that reproduce dichotomies and hero narratives.

• Intentional environmental and economic impacts and transparency: Through program purchasing, contracting, and arrangement of housing, learning spaces, transportation, or other necessary program components, I  work to ensure just remuneration, consciously distributed across networks, and with consideration of the environmental impacts of purchasing decisions. Throughout, I work to maximize transparency.

• Critical visioning of how we move toward more just, inclusive, sustainable communities and global community. Through informal and formal educational environments, I work with others to systematically analyze the world(s) we inhabit today, building our capacities to address our greatest challenges, while also envisioning and enacting the steps we need to build more just, inclusive, and sustainable communities nearby and as members of an interdependent planet.

By joining the Collaborative's network, or re-affirming my participation, I commit myself to partnership-building that exhibits these characteristics. I recognize that several of these commitments may be challenging. But I see the importance  of them and commit myself to working with other network members to achieve them in my context and beyond.