Full Circle Living is a way of living with greater awareness that our well-being is connected to the well-being of all. It can be succinctly thought of as a conscientious effort to consider everyone our neighbor, and include everyone in the circle of those we care about. Because we aim to widen our circle to include our community, our country, and the world, we call this becoming part of a Universal Neighborhood...
Opportunity and resource disparities are amplified for women and girls. We believe that bringing “feminine” influence into equal balance with the “masculine” is the best way to accelerate addressing these disparities. Significant gender imbalance in making critical decisions that affect society exists today. For there to be any hope for this Universal Neighborhood, we collectively need to ensure women have an equal footing with men and we need to fully unleash the economic and leadership power of women.
Re-redistribution is the action of 'giving up' something, in terms of wealth, opportunities, power and influence, that have been accrued due to privilege. Re-redistribution describes an individual's responsibility to 'make amends', by taking resources that were once redistributed away from Black Americans and American Indians in particular, and returning this wealth and opportunity to those it rightly belonged to in the first place.
We cannot have a Universal Neighborhood, where our well-being is connected to the well-being of all, if we continue to alter history to be what we want, rather than how it really was. The discrimination affecting females, Black Americans, and American Indians was exacerbated in the United States when COVID-19 hit these groups disproportionately hard in 2020; access to quality healthcare, the police killings of Black Americans, and the continued inequity in our society were reinforced for these populations. Examining the history behind this endemic racism and intergenerational trauma unveiled the “real history” of our country that connects us all, much of which we were never taught. How can we move the equity needle for our entire society without redressing the wrongs of America’s past and present? Our solution to this is reparations or as we call it, re-redistribution. Established in 2000, Full Circle Living is the umbrella under which we work towards our overarching goal to help “level the playing field” for everyone we consider neighbors. In 2008, after extensive involvement in the community, research, and listening to those on the ground doing the work, we continued to narrow our focus to view organizations and projects through a gender lens, establishing a policy to review everything we do and support with an emphasis on gender balance. Ensuring that the leadership, staff, and board comprise a minimum of 50% women, and that “feminine” influence is in equal balance to the “masculine,” promotes a greater opportunity to address the many disparities that females disproportionately face in our society. Considering all of these endemic conditions we are convinced re-redistribution is a solution.
Land Acknowledgment
Full Circle Living acknowledges the Muscogee Nation, whose land the FCL Office is located on. We pay respect to the tribes that occupied this land before us, cultivating their own society which they were forcibly removed from. We pay our respects to the stewardship by the Muscogee people of the land we currently occupy and recognize the significant history that is not often taught.
Through our work in re-redistribution to Black Americans and American Indians, we keep the Muscogee Nation in mind, considering ways we can continue to learn, honor and contribute to current efforts in making amends after the years of oppression this tribe has faced. FCL is committed to learning the unbiased history of the land we inhabit, as well as encouraging our neighbors, family, community members, and other colleagues to do the same.
REPARATIONS
Reparations to descendants of previously enslaved African Americans is an important case to be made to address wealth inequity for Black Americans. The following estimates were taken from 'The Black Reparations Project' developed by William A. Darity Jr., A. Kirsten Mullen, & Lucas Hubbard. We chose to share these figures to help exemplify the outcomes of slavery, and extent to which slave labor supported so many White Americans financially, while excluding Black Americans. We show the connection to Black American status of substantial income and wealth disparities compared to their White counterparts.
*Disclaimer - Full Circle Living supports reparations in all forms, but does not have a sole focus on monetary reparations through government policy. Rather, Full Circle Living's work emphasizes re-redistribution of gained wealth in a system that had favored White Americans over Black Americans. These statistics are important to the way Full Circle Living views and weights the importance of reparations and the compounding effect of racial discrimination in the U.S.