Our Approach to Collaboration, Content Sharing, and Community Engagement
At OPEN, our mission is to advance rights and acceptance for non-monogamous families and relationships. Achieving this requires reaching as many people in our community as possible, wherever they are and however they engage with our movement. This means embracing a big-tent approach to movement building rather than attempting to control who amplifies our message or how our content spreads.
Whether it's someone sharing our resources on social media, a podcast featuring our work, an organization distributing our materials, or a community group using our toolkit, we recognize that broad distribution serves our mission. This post clarifies our philosophy on collaboration, content sharing, and community engagement.
A Big-Tent Movement with Core Values
Building a successful movement for non-monogamy rights means working alongside people with varied perspectives on relationships, politics, and social issues. The non-monogamous community is diverse, and we cannot advance our shared advocacy goals by enforcing ideological conformity on every issue.
However, this big-tent approach has limits. OPEN holds core organizational values that we will not compromise, including our commitment to being inclusive, monogamy-friendly, movement-minded, intersectional, anti-oppression, impact-oriented, culturally humble, and kind. While we welcome broad content sharing, we also aim to be judicious about who we actively platform and partner with, and we take community safety seriously.
Anyone Can Share Our Content
We welcome and encourage anyone to share OPEN's content, resources, and messaging—whether on social media, in newsletters, at community events, on podcasts, or through any other medium. We do not monitor, manage, or restrict who amplifies our work. When someone shares our content, that does not constitute OPEN's endorsement of that person, organization, or their other activities.
Our educational materials, research findings, and advocacy messages are designed to inform and empower the non-monogamous community. We want these resources to reach as many people as possible, regardless of the intermediary.
Active Outreach Doesn't Equal Endorsement
We proactively reach out to content creators, podcasters, organizations, community groups, and other stakeholders to encourage them to share our work and participate in our initiatives. This strategic outreach is mission-driven: we're trying to reach members of the non-monogamous community wherever they gather and whoever they follow.
When we ask someone to share our content, sign onto our advocacy campaigns, or amplify our message, we are not endorsing their other work, beliefs, or practices. We are simply recognizing that they have an audience or platform that can help us reach our community. There's an important distinction between allowing or encouraging content sharing and actively platforming or formally partnering with individuals or organizations.
Follows and Engagement Aren't Endorsements
We follow a wide range of accounts and engage with diverse voices in the non-monogamy space and adjacent movements. This allows us to monitor conversations, understand community concerns, track developments in the movement, and stay informed about relevant issues.
Following an account or engaging with someone's content does not indicate approval of everything that person or organization does. These are research and engagement tools, not stamps of approval.
Our Accountability
OPEN takes full responsibility for the content we create, the positions we take, and the partnerships we form. Our organizational values guide our work and decision-making. We cannot and do not take responsibility for everything done by people who share our content, but we do take seriously our responsibility to uphold our values in our own programming and official activities.
We welcome feedback from our community. If you have concerns about our work, partnerships, or approach, please reach out:
General feedback: Contact form
Anonymous feedback (delivered to our Executive Director): Anonymous form
Feedback about our Executive Director: Board contact info available here
We're committed to building a movement that is both broad and principled – one that reaches diverse communities while staying grounded in our core values of inclusion, justice, and respect.
