SIREN

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About Us

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What Is SIREN?

The Spartanburg Initiative for Racial Equity Now (SIREN) is a collective that works to embody and create a thriving community.

 

SIREN exists, in part, to help amplify the voices that are often excluded from the conversations that shape this city, county, and state. 

 

Members come from all walks of life. We pride ourselves on our racial, ethnic, cultural, gender, and generational diversity.

What does our work look like?

It’s a cycle. Enter anywhere, engage anywhere that speaks to you. At the center, and part of every endeavor, is the purpose that binds us: thriving in the community.

Here’s one way the work in that circle might flow for an issue that’s an urgent topic in Spartanburg (and around the world): access to housing in neighborhoods that foster individual and community thriving.

What are our objectives?

  1. To encourage and elevate a culture of robust, informed discussion, including strongly worded, constructive critique, in shared (public) spaces.
  2. To foster the participatory inclusion of greater numbers of people of diverse backgrounds, identities, and life experiences in decision-making in community work.
  3. To assert and advocate for the right to housing, thriving neighborhood life, and healthy neighborhoods for all (without uneven toxic load from waste sites, lead, air pollution, or inequitable access to green spaces, parks).
  4. To communicate diverse and heterogeneous perspectives and experiences on issue areas for the purposes of informing others and deepening our own understandings of experiences and lives in the community we share.
  5. To be a watchdog, keeping an eye on organizations, agencies, and offices, so as to invite, encourage, and expect their accountability to the public they serve.
  6. To lower the barriers to participation in civic life by elevating the community care of those at the grassroots, and especially BIPOC individuals, and by onboarding “new-to-the-movement” folks in ways that minimize the burden on BIPOC individuals to educate “new-to-movement” white participants.
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Vision & Mission

We envision a society where the legacy and inherited systems and culture of white supremacy have been dismantled, where policy decisions and resource allocations are handled in an equitable manner, and where people of any race, ethnicity, gender, age or sexual identity feel welcomed and valued.

Mission

SIREN exists, in part, to help amplify the voices that are often excluded from the conversations that shape this city, county and state. 

Members come from all walks of life. We pride ourselves on our racial, ethnic, cultural, gender and generational diversity.

 

Our Commitment

We will act as a resource for BIPOC communities that are working to build their economic power and equitable access to and representation in leadership institutions.

We will take direct action to accomplish this through:

Policy research

Storytelling/journalism

Community outreach (building an agenda and grassroots support for it)

Advocating for change

Holding institutions, elected officials and others in leadership positions accountable if they fail to adapt.