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A CALL TO OUR GUIDING INSTITUTIONS
DECEMBER
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In this spirit, we invite all individuals, communities, groups, and organizations engaged with the organizations of civil society to reassess their roles for the next century.
Each is invited:
to operate on principles of transparency, democracy. accountability, and cooperation;
to exemplify and cultivate moral leadership through thoughtful, consistent service and advocacy:
to commit to service to a larger social good, rather than to the self-interest of a particular group:
THE CALL TO ORGANIZATIONS OF CIVIL SOCIETY
to establish firm, friendly, supportive alliances among themselves, toward eventual collaboration in support of larger constituencies and causes;
to work together with other guiding institutions to assure the poor, the illiterate, and the inarticulate a strong, cogent voice in the public forum;
to broaden access to participation in civil society, with particular outreach to women, to youth, to indigenous peoples, and to the physically or mentally challenged;
to clear the public forum of all assumptions that disagreement is equivalent to treason, so that opinion and action are neither compelled nor withheld out of fear;
to listen to critics and consult with opponents, and to attend patiently to internal controversy, promoting the active, positive agency of each individual and group:
to make dialogue possible and promising where it seems most unlikely, especially among groups that consider themselves long-standing rivals for power, prestige, or pride of place;
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to help establish new templates of interaction and participation as they expand their partnerships with national governments and international agencies, so that cooperative, inclusive, and non-adversarial approaches to decision making become the norm at every level of society.
1999 PARLIAMENT OF THE WORLD'S RELIGIONS
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