Introduction
This Guide is for everyone who wants to build thriving places of belonging.
Across our planet, people are looking for effective ways to build just, equitable, and inclusive institutions that serve and support everyone. Even more challenging, we’re looking for ways to do so without fueling the growing fragmentation that is separating us from each other and our sense of humanity.
The distinct belonging framework developed by the Othering & Belonging Institute (OBI) includes a set of principles and practices that can root out structural inequality and exclusion of all kinds while helping us turn toward, rather than against, each other.
Beyond a call for inclusion into pre-existing structures built to serve only some of us, belonging asks each of us to commit to co-creating new structures built for everyone.
This is no small task. But we believe that belonging is a rich, multi-pronged concept that is up to the challenge, in part, because it is emergent and evolving. It is not limited to being just a feeling, or a slogan, or a quick “to-do.” Its robustness comes from its roots in a range of fields including sociology, neuroscience, psychology, law, and political science, but it draws equally from the wisdom and experiences of community-builders, artists, and storytellers.
Belonging is powerful because it works as an aspirational north star that helps us declare the kind of world and communities we want to live in—vibrant and interconnected healthy ones in which everyone holds the agency, responsibility, and power to co-create the structures that serve the good of the whole.
While the term belonging is used to mean many things, here at OBI we think of belonging as the antidote to othering—the denial of a person or group’s humanity based on their identity, and the process of generating structural inequality found at every level of society (read more in The Problem of Othering). We also emphasize the role that structures play in either building or prohibiting belonging.
We developed this model of belonging because we know that if we continue to divide into smaller we’s, and prevent each other from fully contributing to the whole because of differences like religion or race, we simply will not survive as a species. Put simply—differences of all kinds should be celebrated, not turned into fictitious stories that sort people into hierarchies of value.
While we’ve done our best to create a set of principles that can work anywhere, we recognize that context and culture matter deeply. So whether you’re in Kansas City or Kyoto, Jacksonville or Johannesburg, or Boston or Buenos Aires, we invite you to be in conversation with these principles and to explore how you might adapt them for your part of the world. We look forward to learning how you made them work for you, and how your adaptations can help make them work for everyone.
If you’re ready to create a more just, impactful, and joyous school, workplace, or society, then join us on this journey of becoming a belonging-builder.
Belonging Design Principles At-A-Glance
