Conduct Supporter Agreement

Overview

This document forms part of our emerging set of Participation Agreements, and outlines how we currently understand our:

Shared responsibilities for supporting each other to align our behaviour with our Conduct Agreement
Types of roles we can expect each other to opt-into as we support each other
Ways of distributing the work associated with different types of roles

Summary

This agreement is intended to help us implement our Conduct Agreement, which includes a commitment to sharing responsibility for reducing harm, navigating conflict, and learning from mistakes and misunderstandings while contributing to the project.

We agree to take on the responsibilities associated with the two distinct Conduct Supporter roles outlined below. The rotating allocation of Conduct Supporter roles is intended to help us distribute the labour of supporting each other to implement our collective agreements.

An additional Coordinator for Conduct Support role is also outlined below. This role is intended to help coordinate Conduct Support for those involved with the project yet not currently participating so they can engage in the conduct agreement response as needed. This coordination role can be opted into by participants and, as a back up, will rotate between active participants.

This agreement can be summarised as follows:

We agree to treat our Conduct Supporter roles as operating in the context of our participation in this collective; not as a replacement for the support we need within our lives more generally
We agree to practice offering, giving, asking for, and receiving distinct types of support in the context of our collective agreements
We agree to commit to the asymmetrical responsibilities of asking for and offering distinct types of conduct support from/to different people
We agree to processes for distributing allocation of Conduct Supporter roles while involved in the collective
While participating, we agree to periodically act in the Coordinator for Conduct Support role.

Details

Conduct Supporter Roles

> 1. We agree to treat our Conduct Supporter roles as operating in the context of our participation in this collective; not as a replacement for the support we need within our lives more generally.

> 2. We agree to practice offering, giving, asking for, and receiving distinct types of support in the context of our collective agreements.

Conduct Supporter roles are intended to help us distribute the labour of meeting our shared conduct expectations when resolving misunderstandings, identifying and responding to conflicts, reducing the conditions within which we might harm each other, and practising how we respond to harm when it does occur.

Each Conduct Supporter role is intended to be reciprocated via an asymmetrical distribution of labour within the collective. Put another way, in each of the Conduct Supporter roles we provide ‘one-way’ conduct support for another participant, while another participant is also available to us for ‘one-way’ conduct support.

> 3. We agree to commit to the asymmetrical responsibilities of asking for and offering distinct types of conduct support from/to different people.

Each participant is allocated two conduct supporters with distinct roles, described below (see the following section for more detail on how each of these supporter roles is distributed ).

Care Supporter

The core responsibilities of this role are:

Holding space for participants to express their feelings and perspectives without judgement or advice.
Responding to requests for care following situations in which participants felt misunderstood and/or contributed to others feeling misunderstood; participated in or witnessed a conflict; and/or contributed to or experienced harm.
Supporting a participant who has expressed feelings about actions within the collective that are at odds with our shared expectations or values, to initiate the appropriate ‘Response Guidelines’ from our Conduct Agreement.
Holding space for feelings of participants whose actions have been described by others as at odds with the shared expectations outlined in our Conduct Agreement.

See the Supplementary Materials for examples.

Accountability Supporter

The core responsibilities of this role are:

Engaging in courageous conversations with participants wanting to explore multiple perspectives on how their actions in the collective may have contributed to a particular situation of misunderstanding, conflict, or harm.
Supporting participants who want to hold themselves accountable for the ways their actions were felt by themselves or others to have contributed to misunderstandings, conflict, and/or harmful situations.
Supporting participants who feel other participants have acted at odds with the shared expectations outlined in our Conduct Agreement to consider alternative perspectives on the situation prior to initiating the relevant conduct response.
Supporting a participant to engage with a Conduct Agreement response after learning that they have acted in ways that feel to another participant as at odds with the shared expectations outlined in our Conduct Agreement.

See the Supplementary Materials for examples.

Distributing Conduct Supporter Roles

Distributed supporter role allocation is intended to avoid the uneven distribution of labour that can occur when we self-select our supporters/supporter roles, and to help us to take collective responsibility for identifying and responding to tension and conflicts early and often.

> 4. We agree to accept agreed processes for distributing allocation of supporter roles while involved with the collective

Conduct Supporter roles will be distributed among all participants via an algorithm that matches participants into a web of support for a specified period of time. To distribute the asymmetrical Conduct Supporter roles, each participant will be allocated:

A Care Supporter AND a different participant for whom they will act in a Care Supporter role.
- An Accountability Supporter AND a different participant for whom they will act in an Accountability Supporter role.

Allocated supporter roles will be set for three months. During this time, allocations can be redistributed if a participant does not have the expected number of conduct supporters (e.g. one of their conduct supporters goes on hiatus or exits the collective).

Coordinator for Additional Conduct Support Roles:

> 5. While participating, we agree to periodically act in the Coordinator for Conduct Support role.

The person in the Coordinator for Conduct Support role is responsible for:

Identifying an appropriate participant or collaborator (inclusive of themselves) to act in the role of Conduct Supporter for the following:
- Collaborators when they request a Conduct Supporter to engage in our conduct agreement responses
- Any participants who are onboarding or on hiatus and request a Conduct Supporter to engage in our conduct agreement responses
- Any participant who needs a new Conduct Supporter to engage in our conduct agreement responses (because one of their current Conduct Supporters were not available or had acted in ways that they felt violated our conduct expectations).

This role is a collective responsibility that will be filled each interval, via:

Any participant opting into the role
- If no-one opts-into this role, it is allocated in a way that rotates it amongst participants with additional responsibilities
  - If no-one has opted in to additional responsibilities, the role is allocated in a way that rotates it amongst all participants.

Review Conditions

This agreement will be reviewed in any of the following conditions:

Whenever a participant proposes an amendment to this agreement
When another agreement is amended in ways that impact the implementation of this agreement
Every two years (if not otherwise reviewed in that timeframe)

Supplementary Materials: Context Questions & Assumptions

Questions about Reasoning & Scope

Why do we need a Conduct Supporters agreement?

This agreement is intended to help us implement our conduct agreement. Because learning to participate in transformative approaches to conflict could be a long journey, this agreement offers a structure within which we can support each other to contribute to a culture where we take collective responsibility for the conditions that contribute to mistakes, misunderstandings, conflicts, and/or harm. Examples of the things this agreement helps us practice include:

Recognising that conflict is inevitable and that everyone is capable of causing harm, whether or not there was intent.
Learning from our mistakes and other contributions to the misunderstandings, inevitable conflicts, and instances of harm that occur in the course of the project.
Ensuring that support work does not just fall to those who have been socialised to feel responsible for it.
Being more intentional about when and why, and from whom, we ask for support
Being more intentional about when and why, and for whom, we provide support
Differentiating between care support and support to hold ourselves accountable for the consequences of our actions.

What is the scope of Conduct Supporter responsibilities?

IN-SCOPE:
- Responsibilities for conduct support required for us to implement our other collective agreements as participants and collaborators are clearly within the scope of our collective responsibility.
- These responsibilities differ for each support role (see Section on the number and types of Supporter Roles examples).
OUT-OF-SCOPE:
- Support requests that are unrelated to participation in this housing collective (noting that at times individuals who are participants in the collective may also have separately agreed to support each other outside the context of involvement in the same housing collective). We encourage participants to practice reaching out to their broader support networks for these forms of support.
- Support for non-participants (with the exception of collaborators who have initiated a Conduct Agreement Response)

How do we learn to implement our Conduct Supporter responsibilities?

We expect this learning to be an ongoing process with opportunities to learn and practice together skills for offering, giving, asking for, and receiving distinct types of support in the context of our collective agreements.
Onboarding for new participants will additionally include:
- Context on the distinctions between the different types of supporter roles
- Directions to resources we’ve created or curated so far in the collective related to how we support each other.

Why is this such a long/complex agreement?

The default practices for responding to mistakes, misunderstandings, conflict, and harm reproduce punitive structures of oppression.
It takes time and practice to unlearn these defaults and learn alternative ways of supporting each other in ways that allow us to transform ourselves and our society in ways that contribute to more liberatory futures for all.
We hope that by intentionally structuring our participation practices to distribute specific forms of care and accountability support we can prefigure futures where these structures are no longer needed.

Why doesn’t this agreement consider all possible scenarios we might face as a collective? / Is this agreement (or any of our participation agreements) perfect and set in stone?

We expect this agreement to be updated as we try, fail, learn, and review our shared expectations of how to navigate the ever-changing dynamics of our collective.
It is not set in stone. All of our participation agreements are living documents that both guide and reflect how we actually behave towards each other and together in the world. We expect them to be amended via collective process to both reflect changes in our aspirations and document emerging current practices.

Questions about Supporter Roles

Why do we need a Coordinator for some Conduct Support Roles?

This role is needed to ensure that our Conduct Agreement is relevant to all involved in the collective, including participants on hiatus, participants who are being onboarded and collaborators.
Particularly, in order to navigate the Conduct Agreement response as it is described in the Conduct Agreement active participants will have access to their Supporters. We also want to ensure that collaborators and participants on hiatus, have access to at least one Conduct Supporter, if they want one. This may be someone from their own support network or they may request assistance from the Coordinator for Conduct Support to engage someone to act as Conduct Supporter for them. We want to have a process in place in case it is needed.

Why do we need a Care Supporter Role?

When complemented by accountability practices, care support can focus on listening to someone express their perspective and respecting the kinds of support requested (even when these may be different to the kinds of support we think they need or ‘should’ have).

Why do we need an Accountability Supporter Role?

Accountability support can be understood as supporting someone to take responsibility for the consequences of their choices, acknowledge when these impact others, and learn to make choices that are more aligned with our conduct expectations and collectively agreed values (and less likely to harm others). Remembering that, “People can support you to be accountable, but no one but you can do the hard work of taking accountability for yourself. Don’t wait until someone else has to bring up your behavior.” (Mia Mingus)
For the person holding themselves accountable, taking responsibility requires being able to recognise and sit with uncomfortable feelings; recognising how actions align with values (or not); acknowledging when and how actions contributed to harm; and identifying how to move forward to act in ways that are more values aligned going forward and avoid contributing to harm - for more see this video: What is Accountability?
While supporting someone to hold themselves accountable is a form of care-work (broadly understood), it can be helpful to treat it as different from the care support defined above because each requires a different form of interaction (as described above).

What are some examples of Care Support?

Examples of care support following a particular situation of mistake, misunderstanding, conflict, or harm include:

Listening to someone express the feelings associated with a situation without judgement or advice, while offering tenderness, attentiveness, regard, and consideration
Supporting a participant to articulate and share their perspective of behaviours within the collective they experience as contributing to misunderstandings, conflict, or harmful situations.
Reminding participants to reach out to their Accountability Supporter for additional forms of conduct support.

What are some examples of Accountability Support?

Example acts of accountability support following a particular situation of mistake, misunderstanding, conflict, or harm include offers include:

Listening to a feeling-based interpretation of a situation without judgement or advice, with a “yes, and” perspective on what else might be true with regards to the situation.
Support to consider the situation using the ladder of inference framework (by considering our own and others’ sets of assumptions, observations, conclusions and actions).
If requested, gently sharing when/how the situation may be understood from alternative perspectives.
Providing / looking together for resources for learning how to interact in ways that are less likely to contribute to misunderstanding, conflict, or harm.
Supporting the process of recognising when actions aren’t aligning with our collectively agreed expectations.
Supporting engagement in the relevant processes outlined in our other agreements
Supporting practice while learning to interact in mutually agreed ways (e.g., role play)
Reminding participants to reach out to their Care Supporter for additional forms of conduct support.

Won’t I need both care and accountability in most situations? Why separate these into two roles?

Yes, we often need both care and accountability support, especially when we contribute to the conditions within which we are impacted by mistakes, misunderstandings, conflict, and harm.

By practising distributing the labour of giving and receiving both care support and accountability support with different people, we hope to learn how to take more collective responsibility for navigating the nuance of these situations.

This includes allowing ourselves to experience the feelings of being impacted (with the support of our care supporter) while also actively considering our contributions to the impactful situation (with the help of our accountability supporter). By drawing on the combination of these supporter roles we hope to feel safe enough to consider how our behaviour has contributed to a situation in which others feel impacted (with the help of our accountability supporter) and express how the situation may also be impacting us (with the help of our care supporter).

The following examples artificially separate the complexities of the care/accountability support needed in any given situation to help illustrate the value of having different people act in each of these roles for each of us:

A care supporter may be particularly useful when a participant is: :

Feeling misunderstood by others in the collective and wanting to debrief with someone who is willing to listen without trying to find solutions (including feeling misunderstood when others’ express concern about their behaviours not aligning with collective conduct expectations)
Feeling impacted by the actions of others and needing support to raise the incident with others in the collective

An accountability supporter may be particularly useful when a participant is:

Wanting to explore the perspective others have shared about how their behaviour may have contributed to conflict and/or a harmful situation
Wanting to talk through any differences between the perspectives others have about their behaviour and their own perspective on the conditions in which conflict and/or harmful situations have emerged
Asked to respond to a concern raised about their behaviour not meeting the collective conduct expectations and need support to:
- examine the degree to which their behaviours match their intentions and/or
- explore any differences between how they understand the collective conduct expectations and how others are expecting them to conduct themselves
Need support to identify if, when, and how they genuinely want to hold themselves accountable for the ways their behaviours may have contributed to situations of conflict and/or harm by :
- Exploring the perspective others have shared about how their behaviour contributed to a situation
- Talking through any differences between the perspective of others and their own perspective about the conditions in which the situation emerged.
- Reflecting on how their behaviours have contributed to the conditions within which a situation occurred
- Asking for space to acknowledge that a situation has impacted others, clarify their intentions, and ask for clarifications about how others feel their actions have impacted them (without being expected to take responsibility for the situation)
Wanting to hold themselves accountable for their contributions to conflict and/or harmful situations and need support to:
- Recognise and sit with uncomfortable feelings
- Acknowledge when and how their actions contributed to the situations of concern to others
- Learn about ways that their behaviour might better align with the ways we agree to conduct ourselves within the context of this collective (including in ways that might help avoid similar mistakes or misunderstandings and/or reduce the distress and/or harm experienced by others from their actions going forward).
- Take responsibility for the pre-agreed consequences of acting in ways that don’t align with collective conduct expectations
- Participate in adjusting collective practices in ways that help us to reduce the likelihood of repeating the set of conditions within which the conflict and/or harmful situations emerged.

Participants are expected to ask both their care supporter and accountability supporter for help navigating situations within the group. The supporters for a participant (or multiple participants) may need to talk to each other when:

A situation is complex, with multiple layers of mistakes, misunderstandings or harm
Initial attempts to navigate conflict are unproductive and they need additional help in mediating discussions about how to move forward.
In situations outlined in one of our other collective agreements (e.g., the conduct agreement).

In addition to responding to requests for support as described in the examples above, these roles may also include responsibilities detailed in our other agreements.

Why haven’t we included any other types of supporter roles?

Care and accountability supporter roles are intended as a minimum set of support that we can practice to help us differentiate between types of support needed to implement our conduct agreement. We may want to introduce other support roles after we have more experience offering, giving, asking for, and receiving these distinct forms of support.
Other forms of support are described in other agreements, including the onboarding supporter role (in the Entry and Exit Pathway Agreement and the participation buddy role in our Participation Buddy Guidelines.
Participants can propose amendments to add additional supporter roles that become relevant within the context of our collective capacity to support each other.

Questions about the Mutli-Role Distribution Approach

Why should we try a distributed multi-role support approach to our conduct support system?

We are experimenting with a distributed-support system that differentiates between mutual support, care support and accountability support. These distinctions offer us one pathway towards learning to take collective responsibility for identifying and responding to conflicts early and often, reducing the conditions within which we might harm each other, and practising how we respond to harm when it does occur.
A multi-role supporter system is a way of creating explicit roles for each form of support so that we can learn to get better at knowing when and how to ask, offer, and receive support in the form of care and accountability respectively. For example:
- If a person has a care supporter to hold space for them to express their perspective on being misunderstood or harmed, then an accountability supporter can focus on challenging them to do the difficult work of learning from different perspectives on their actions and taking responsibility for the impact their actions have had on others (intentionally or otherwise).
- And, vice-versa, a care supporter can focus on listening to a person’s perspective and facilitating their requested support needs if they know the person will also be seeing an accountability supporter to challenge them to see alternative perspectives on the situation if needed. Additionally, those in these roles can collaborate to support multiple participants navigate a complex situation where there are conflicting perspectives on a given situation.

Why are supporter roles distributed among active participants (and not participants on hiatus, or collaborators)?

To encourage us to learn and practice offering, giving, asking for and receiving care and accountability support to and from different people. Doing so may also help us develop skills in navigating conflicts with people we haven’t established relationships with while building relationships with other participants in the collective.
Experimenting with a distributed multi-role conduct support system may be challenging and sometimes we may need a break. To allow for this, Collaborators and participants on hiatus are not expected to act in any supporter roles; with participants distributing the labour of supporting Collaborators to initiate Conduct Agreement responses as organised by the Conduct Supporter Coordinator.

How does the Conduct Supporter Distribution algorithm work?

Whenever possible participants who have been fully onboarded will:
- be allocated as both:
- a Care Supporter for one other participant;
- an Accountability supporter for another participant;
- and be allocated both:
  - a Care Supporter (by a participant that they are not currently supporting), and
  - an Accountability Supporter (by a participant that they are not currently supporting).
As noted in the agreement: “Allocated supporter roles will be set for three months. During this time, allocations can be redistributed if a participant does not have the expected number of conduct supporters (e.g. one of their conduct supporters goes on hiatus or exits the collective).”
Conduct Supporter Coordinators are allocated based on an attempt to preserve the current distributed allocations of supporter roles where possible.
Collaborators and participants who are onboarding or on hiatus will be allocated a Conduct Supporter on request. The process for requesting a Conduct Supporter is to ask the Conduct Supporter Coordinator to initiate one of our conduct agreement responses.

Questions about Jargon Terms and Assumed Knowledge

What do we mean by ‘layered circles of support’?

While care is often positioned as direct, it is important to remember our collective responsibility for contributing to ‘layered circles of care’ around people (e.g. during crisis or following experiencing harm) to ensure that our acts of care are sustainable. This means we offer care to a person who is more impacted by a situation than us and ask for care from a person who is less impacted by the situation than us.
Likewise, when we are offering care and accountability support we can practice ‘supporting in’ and ‘dumping out’ by seeking out different people from whom we can debrief our experience as supports to (i.e., our respective care and/or accountability supporters).

What do we mean by practising asking/offering conduct support ‘early and often’?

Practising skills in low consequence conflict can prepare us for if/when we need to collectively navigate more serious instances of violence and/or abuse (i.e., behaviours …intended to gain, exert, and maintain power over another person or in a group).

The skills this conduct supporter roles support include:

Identifying when we need care support as distinct from accountability support, and vice versa
Communicating who is going to whom for support about what (and why)
Knowing when and why it is useful to ensure that the people supporting someone who experienced as specific instance of harm are different from those supporting the people who are willing to take responsibility for their contributions to that specific instance of harm
Distributing roles offers us an opportunity to practice some of the skills needed to help facilitate Community Accountability process when these are appropriate.

Where can I find more information about other jargon terms and assumed-knowledge in this agreement?

The ‘collective’ referenced in this agreement is the Brassica Collective, as described in our handbook
This agreement assumes familiarity with our broader set of collective agreements and any ambiguities in this agreement should be interpreted in that context. In this context:
- ‘we’ refers to all current participants and collaborators in the Brassica Collective.
- A ‘current participant’ is described in the Responsibilities and Expectations Agreement
- A ‘collaborator’ is described in the Collaborators Guidelines
This agreement draws on lessons from transformative approaches to navigating conflict and disability justice approaches to moving at the speed of trust when building collective practices, for more context and definitions of terms in this context, see our Conduct Agreement.
Key terms include:
- Accountability = willingness to accept responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions
- Consequence = the results or effects of an action or condition
For any unfamiliar terminology not adequately explained in our glossary of terms, please ask for help to update our glossary and/or propose an amendment to this agreement as appropriate.

Conduct Agreement Entry and Exit Pathways