The Simplicity Practice And Resource Centre (SPARC) is guided by the following principles and values:
- Voluntary
Simplicity
Voluntary simplicity is a freely chosen way of life that aims to discover and actively fashion the lowest level of material consumption consistent with the highest level of human good. Simple living is rooted in mindfulness, free choice, justice, nonviolence, and ecological responsibility. Voluntary simplicity is the deliberate organization of life for a purpose.
- Self-reliance
We strive to promote local production to meet local needs, and to discern the optimum level of production-for-own-consumption consistent with development of the full range of human potentials. We also aim to assist and sustain individual self-reliance through cooperative, community-focused activities.
- Cooperation / Mutual
Aide
We recognize and cultivate cooperative values and approaches to livelihood, especially those that contribute most directly to sustaining individual lives of simplicity, justice, and nonviolence.
- Mindfulness
We affirm the value of mindfulness, and individual and collective practices that cultivate mindfulness, as the foundation of joyful simplicity, voluntary choice, and social and ecological responsibility.
- Environmental
Sustainability
A commitment to sustainability entails an obligation to meet our needs and exercise our gifts so as to respect, preserve, and harmlessly integrate human activity with the life and well-being of the ecosphere.
- Participation
We affirm participatory systems of governance that derive the legitimacy and power of the state from the free consent and active cooperation of the governed through democratic institutions. We also affirm the importance of protection of minority and individual rights within a system of impartial laws.
- Nonviolence
We embrace and actively advocate approaches to livelihood, governance, and social change which are rooted in the principles and practices of nonviolence (ahimsa, satyagraha). We seek to transform and redress both individual and structural violence in all our activities and programs.
- Equity
We recognize that extreme differences in wealth, political power, social influence, and access to the pre-requisites to a good life are destructive of individual well-being, socially destabilizing, and morally unjust. We strive to promote equity in all our activities and programs.
- Individual
Responsibility
Fashioning a good life is primarily an individual responsibility and an artwork. This work, however, can be promoted or inhibited by social structures and public policies expressed both in custom and in law. SPARC aims to promote social and economic structures that support and affirm individual efforts to fashion a good life through voluntary simplicity.
- Spirituality
Our visions of simple living and our mission to promote it are grounded in, and express, a variety of spiritual sensibilities. We prize a diversity of spiritual traditions, beliefs and practices, even as we take up a common work to promote simple, sustainable, and peaceable ways of living. Our practice of simplicity is the deliberate organization of our lives to manifest in the world what we understand to be highest and best in human experience.
- Beauty
We affirm the importance of both natural and human-made beauty as essential to well-being. We see simple living as fully consistent with the creation, possession, and preservation of beauty in our surroundings and artifacts.
- Evolutionary
Development
We recognize that different people need to experiment with the values and practices of voluntary simplicity in different ways, to different degrees, and through an evolving process that may be different for each individual. We affirm each person’s evolution in the practice of simple living even as we continue to challenge everyone to grow in the direction of stronger forms of practice.