What everyone who leads this program agrees to, in addition to the values every participant holds.

This agreement applies to anyone in a leadership or workstream-lead role. It includes every value in the Participant Values Agreement, plus what it means to be a guardian of them.

Operating Committee Values Agreement

Every leader additionally agrees that:

We refuse to let one person carry unchecked authority

We hold distributed responsibility as core to how this program thrives. We remember how a single administrator with no oversight and no safe path to raise a concern fueled a crisis necessitating this moment of inflection. Creating resiliency, honesty, and growth is not a problem that is solved once, but something to which we owe vigilance.

We steward sensitive information. We do not own it.

We hold access to participant data, incident reports, and background-check results as a responsibility entrusted to us for a role, not a personal privilege. We carry that responsibility forward even after we leave the role.

We name our conflicts instead of working around them

We hold transparency about our own entanglements as a baseline expectation of leadership: personal relationships, competing interests, prior history with someone in the program. We surface problems instead of sweeping them under the rug.

Silence is not consent

On anything touching participant safety, equity, or our relationship to the Board, we require an explicit yes. Quiet in a room doesn't count as agreement.

We build these values into the program itself

We commit to embedding these values in application language, screening, orientation, evaluation, and every touchpoint a participant experiences. We hold ourselves responsible for flagging when a structure we're building undermines a value we claim to hold.

We lead by example

We recognize that participants learn this community's culture partly by watching how we behave, not just what we say. We hold our own conduct, including how we handle disagreement, how we treat someone who challenges us, and how we handle our own mistakes, as a form of teaching, whether we intend it to be or not.

We hold a vision beyond this cohort

The LDG Mentoring Program is bigger than us. We believe this program's commitment to safety, equity, and repair has value to the broader leather and kink community, not just the people currently in it. We hold ourselves open to being a model others can learn from, and to learning from others doing similar work.

Related: Our Values · Who We Are