Community Rules

This policy is a living document and may be refined or expanded over time.

ProveWorth is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, age, race, or religion. We do not tolerate harassment of members in any form.

This code of conduct applies to all ProveWorth communities and spaces, both online and off. Anyone who violates this code of conduct may be sanctioned or removed from these spaces at the discretion of the ProveWorth team.

Some ProveWorth communities may have additional rules. Those rules will be made clearly available to members. Members are responsible for knowing and abiding by those rules.

Definitions

Harassment includes, but is not limited to:

  • Offensive comments related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neuro(a)typicality, physical appearance, body size, age, race, or religion
  • Unwelcome comments regarding a person’s lifestyle choices and practices, including those related to food, health, parenting, drugs, and employment
  • Deliberate misgendering or use of “dead” or rejected names
  • Gratuitous or off-topic sexual images or behaviour in spaces where they are not appropriate
  • Physical contact and simulated physical contact (for example, textual descriptions like “hug” or “backrub”) without consent or after a request to stop
  • Threats of violence
  • Incitement of violence towards any individual, including encouraging a person to commit suicide or engage in self-harm
  • Deliberate intimidation
  • Stalking or following
  • Harassing photography or recording, including logging online activity for harassment purposes
  • Sustained disruption of discussion
  • Unwelcome sexual attention
  • A pattern of inappropriate social contact, such as requesting or assuming inappropriate levels of intimacy with others
  • Continued one-on-one communication after requests to cease
  • Deliberate outing of any aspect of a person’s identity without their consent, except as necessary to protect vulnerable people from intentional abuse
  • Publication of non-harassing private communication

ProveWorth prioritizes the safety of marginalized people over the comfort of people with more privilege. The ProveWorth team reserves the right not to act on complaints regarding:

  • “Reverse” -isms, including “reverse racism,” “reverse sexism,” and “cisphobia”
  • Reasonable communication of boundaries, such as “leave me alone,” “go away,” or “I am not discussing this with you”
  • Communicating in a “tone” you do not find congenial
  • Criticizing racist, sexist, cis-sexist, or otherwise oppressive behavior or assumptions

Reporting

If you are being harassed by a member of ProveWorth, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, contact the ProveWorth team through the contact page.

If the person who is harassing you is on the ProveWorth team, they will recuse themselves from handling your incident. We will respond as promptly as we can.

This code of conduct applies to ProveWorth spaces, but if you are being harassed by a member of ProveWorth outside our spaces, we still want to know about it. We take all good-faith reports of harassment by ProveWorth members seriously. This includes harassment outside our spaces and harassment that took place at any point in time.

The ProveWorth team reserves the right to exclude people from ProveWorth based on their past behavior, including behavior outside ProveWorth spaces and behavior towards people who are not in ProveWorth.

In order to protect the team and volunteers from abuse and burnout, we reserve the right to reject any report that appears to have been made in bad faith. Reports intended to silence legitimate criticism may be closed without response.

We respect confidentiality requests for the purpose of protecting victims of abuse. At our discretion, we may publicly name a person about whom we have received harassment complaints, or privately warn third parties about them, if we believe that doing so will increase the safety of ProveWorth members or the general public. We will not name harassment victims without their affirmative consent.

Consequences

Members asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately.

If a participant engages in harassing behavior, the ProveWorth team may take any action they deem appropriate, up to and including removal from all ProveWorth spaces and identification of the participant as a harasser to other ProveWorth members or the general public.

Diversity and Inclusion

ProveWorth welcomes and encourages participation by everyone. No matter how you identify yourself or how others perceive you, you are welcome here.

We welcome contributions from everyone as long as they interact constructively with our communities.