Policies, House Rules, Community Expectations
Policies
These are our core commitments that everyone at Karada House is held to.
Anti-Discrimination
Discrimination of any kind is not tolerated at Karada House. Discrimination doesn’t always operate along visible and obvious lines. We understand it rather as any type of action, utterance, or other behaviour that explicitly or implicitly causes division between groups of people on the basis of perceived difference.
Anti-Harassment
Harassment of any kind is not tolerated at Karada House. We understand harassment as a behaviour, including a single action, that is offensive, disturbing, or humiliating, and is directed towards an individual or a group of individuals.
Anti-Abuse
Abuse of any kind is not tolerated at Karada House. We understand abuse as any action, utterance, presentation or other behaviour, that is geared towards the limitation of an individual’s freedom of choice or the causation of physical and/or psychological harm.
Phones, Photograph, Audio & Video
Your phone must be on silent mode, when entering the house. We encourage you to not take your phone into workshop areas unless absolutely necessary.
Photography is only permitted with the full consent of everyone in the frame before the photo has been taken.
Audio and video recordings are not permitted. The only exception is if the device is needed for translation or accessibility purposes. If that is the case, please inform a spaceholder before the event starts.
AI enhanced glasses or other glasses that are capable of recording, face recognition, etc are not permitted.
House Rules
These are the concrete rules for being in our in-house and/or virtual spaces. They are binding for everyone, including facilitators and spaceholders.
Consent
Each and every interaction between individuals at Karada House must be based on affirmative consent. This means that the individuals do everything they can to assess the potential physical and psychological risks associated with the activity they are pursuing and to disclose everything that might be relevant for the other person before engaging in that activity.
Consent is a difficult pursuit, please reach out to a designated spaceholder or facilitator if you would like support.
Confidentiality
What happens at Karada House, stays at Karada House. You can speak about your own experiences but please do not speak about other people. This includes outing people, deadnaming, sharing information that could identify people and taking photos of people without explicit consent.
Boundaries of Play
We do not allow the following types of play: single point inversions, tied-off neck rope, any kind of institutional play (e.g. school, police, etc), uniforms, scat, blood, vomit, anything involving glitter or oils, unless specifically stated otherwise in the event description.
Take Care of the Physical Space
Treat our space and all its physical things with care. Clean up after yourself, and leave the space a little bit better and cleaner than you found it.
Covid-19 and other infectious diseases
If you are feeling sick, showing any symptoms of illness, or have tested positive for Covid 19 or other similarly transmissible infections, please refrain from coming to any event until you are past the infectious period or have been cleared by a health care provider.
Sober Space
Apart from medically prescribed substances, we do not allow people to be at Karada House while intoxicated.
No Shoes
For hygiene and allergy reasons, we do not allow street shoes to be worn inside the house. You are welcome to bring indoor shoes or use our house socks, if needed.
Strong Scents / Perfumes
In order to provide more accessibility for people with allergies and sensory sensibilities, we ask you to not wear or use strong scents, perfumes etc.
Community Expectations
(currently work in progress)
These are the values and expectations we try to hold one another to. This is how we show up, and how we treat ourselves and each other.
Curiosity
Curiosity is the killer of fear. It is a practice that opens doors to yourself and others. Be curious. Do not presume anything about anybody, yourself included. We barely know ourselves, it’s absurd to think we can know others simply by perceiving them.
We all have biases and prejudices against ourselves and others. In this space we try to notice and change them for the better.
We invite you to ask, explore, discover. Try new practices, new names, genders, sexualities, new approaches to learn and discover. Embrace the body as something to be curious about, to move and poke and play with, full of potential that is not fully understood. Discard judgement and competition (with yourself and others), challenge labels and ideas of worthiness, fuckability, abilities and power.
Agency & Accountability
Agency is your right to decide about yourself, your body, and your experiences, and to act on your decision. You don’t need to have yourself all figured out. Agency isn’t earned through self-mastery, competence or expertise. It is the basis for learning and being in community. You decide how you show up in our learning and community spaces, and how you engage with yourself and others. With the teachings, ideas and materials, take what works for you and leave the rest.
We believe in your ability to look after yourself: to find and hold your boundaries, to navigate consent, and to judge your own risks. We also trust that you understand that agency includes accountability. We expect you to take responsibility for your actions and their consequences for yourself and others.
We invite you to reach out to us and ask for support whenever you feel you need it.. To flag when something isn’t working, when you need an adaptation, different accessibility option, another way of doing things, or just someone to listen.
We will always aim to have space holders present whose role is exactly this: to support you, answer your questions, provide physical and psychological first aid, and be there when something comes up. And we offer frameworks, for learning and for being in community, that you can lean on whenever you need them.
Solidarity
Solidarity means choosing collective responsibility for each other, despite and because of our differences. It’s not something you feel, but something you do in immediate, practical, tangible ways.
Karada House is a space for LGBTQIA+ and other marginalized and policed people and bodies. Solidarity in this context means paying attention to the differences, intersectionalities, power structures, abilities and struggles in the room. It means sitting with the ambivalence, the discomfort and the frictions, the differing opinions and needs. Together. And then doing something about it with whatever we’ve got. Together.
to be continued…
