Outsiders Village: Vision and Values
Content updated: September 21, 2026 at 5:50 PM MDT
Contents
• Relationship to other forms of support
• How we will know it is working
Our vision
Outsiders Village is a network of small, relationship-centered spaces for people who live outside what dominant society treats as normal, acceptable, supported, or expected. Outsiders may be BIPOC, disabled, neurodivergent, Deaf or hard of hearing, queer or trans, unconventional in our relationships or lives, or excluded in other ways. No one must prove or rank their outsider status. We want places where people can be fully themselves, build genuine connections, and exchange real mutual care—belonging made by the people present, not a service delivered by an institution or facilitator.
The name describes a shared umbrella rather than one identity. The sustainable form may be many small villages organized around identities, needs, interests, places, or activities. An AuDHD gathering can exist alongside broader neurodivergent, disability, BIPOC, queer, mutual-support, creative, social, or other villages. Each can manage its own gatherings and relationships while the wider Village occasionally comes together to exchange ideas, resources, and experiences.
What “villager” means
A villager is not a customer, client, audience member, or rank. It is a way of participating. Villagers help create the conditions they want to experience, in ways that fit their interests, skills, energy, access needs, and current capacity. Quiet presence counts. Rest counts. Asking for help counts. Hosting a simple event counts.
Our values
- Authenticity over performance. People should not have to mask, become a role, or appear well in order to belong.
- Mutuality over one-way help. Everyone—including hosts and organizers—may give support, need support, and be changed by the relationships they build.
- Relationships over programs. Events and tools exist to help people know and care for one another; the structure is not the point.
- Autonomy, consent, and boundaries. Each person owns their choices, time, body, story, and capacity. No is a completely valid response.
- Contribution without compulsory labor. People are invited to offer what they can, but no one must earn belonging through productivity.
- Distributed responsibility. Organizing, hosting, welcoming, communication, and care should gradually be shared rather than concentrated in one person.
- Human scale. Small gatherings and small self-managing villages make mutual relationships more possible and make concentrated power and institutional drift easier to notice.
- Unruliness with accountability. We resist pressures toward conformity, hierarchy, and control while keeping strong boundaries against coercion, cruelty, harassment, and abuse.
- Curiosity, conflict, and repair. Disagreement is part of relationship. We try to understand impact, take responsibility, make repairs when possible, and change patterns that cause harm.
- Accessibility and low pressure. There should be more than one way to participate. Needs may conflict, so we communicate honestly and look for workable options without promising perfection.
- Experimentation over permanence. We can try an event, group, practice, or tool, learn from it, and change or stop it. Smaller villages may form, merge, split, rebrand, pause, or end according to the people and needs actually present. The Village should not have to become an institution—or preserve every gathering forever—to matter.
- Voting with our feet. One of the strongest protections against hierarchy and control is the ability to leave. No village should become something people feel trapped inside because one person controls the relationships, documents, or tools. If a village no longer fits, people should be able to walk away, join another village that fits better, or build something new.
- Buy Local: Mutual economic support. Money is part of ordinary life, and mutual support can include choosing to hire, buy from, learn from, refer to, or otherwise support another villager’s work. When we already need something, we can choose to look first at what fellow villagers offer, helping resources circulate among people in the Village without turning relationships into sales funnels.
The garden principle
“The secret is not to chase the butterflies. Tend the garden so they come to you.”
We do not chase butterflies. We build a garden worth coming to. Our task is to make something nourishing, welcoming, and alive—not to persuade everyone to join or measure our worth by growth. Even when people come and go, we will still have a beautiful garden to enjoy and be proud of.
Roles without rank
- Villagers participate in whatever ways are honest and sustainable for them.
- Hosts make a particular gathering possible by arranging the place, time, and basic logistics. Hosting does not require charisma, teaching, fixing, or having all the answers.
- Facilitators help a conversation or event function because their skills fit that task. They remain villagers and participants, and they may need as much support as anyone else.
Relationship to other forms of support
Outsiders Village is not meant to replace therapy, professional services, crisis support, or other villages and groups. It offers a different thing: an informal, non-institutional village in which the people organizing a gathering remain part of the relationships they help create rather than standing outside them.
How we will know it is working
- People can show up as themselves without needing to perform a role.
- Relationships are able to grow beyond a single facilitated meeting when people want them to.
- More people initiate gatherings that fit their own abilities and interests.
- No one person must attend, lead, or maintain everything for the village to continue.
- People can name needs, limits, conflict, and change without losing their humanity.
- The structure remains useful, flexible, and small enough to serve relationships instead of replacing them.
Just the start
These values are a starting point. Villagers should be able to suggest changes, question assumptions, and help the words grow alongside the village.
Make it your own
Outsiders Village follows an open-source spirit. These ideas and documents are meant to be adapted, reshaped, and made useful for different people, places, and needs. When borrowing from this framework, attribute the source and clearly identify what you have changed so others can understand where the ideas came from and choose the version that fits them best.