Civil Initiative—our responsibility for protecting the persecuted must be balanced by our accountability to the legal order

• Civil initiative is nonviolent, truthful, wide-ranging, cooperative, pertinent, volunteer-based, and community centered.
•  Nonviolence checks vigilantism.  Civil initiative neither evades nor seizes police powers.
• Truthfulness.  Civil initiative must be open and subject to public examination.

• Civil initiative is wide-ranging and not factional.  It protects those whose rights are being violated, regardless of the victim’s ideological position or political usefulness.
• Civil initiative is cooperative.  Dialogue with authorities must exist in an atmosphere of respect for government officials as persons and with an attitude of willingness to compromise.
• It is pertinent to protect victim’s needs and not succumb to reactions that are primarily symbolic or merely expressive.  Media coverage and public opinion are of secondary importance; or central concern is to do justice rather than to petition others to do it. 
• The community must never forfeit its duty to protect the victims of human rights violations.  But it must be a volunteer-based effort; no new bureaucracy should be formed that would conflict with governmental functions of those constitutionally designated to assume responsibility. 
• Civil initiative is community-centered.  Our exercise of civil initiative must be integrated within the community and must outlast and out reach individuals acts of conscience

                                                                                                       --Jim Corbett  1933-2001