AUREA Policies
Below is an outline of our organizational policies. If you have any questions or feedback for the team, as always, you can reach us at our email, contact@aromanticism.org.
General Policy Statement
AUREA is a volunteer-run initiative. Our team has committed their time to AUREA based on a general love of the aromantic community and a desire to contribute in a positive manner. No one on the team receives any pay for their work.
While we are a team, we are also individuals. Many of us have full time jobs or are enrolled in school full time. Each one of us has a different aromantic experience, a different life experience, and a different viewpoint. Our personal opinions are our own, and should be treated as such.
We are growing as a team and will continue to learn new things. We do our best to listen and reflect the community. If we make a mistake, we ask that you assume it is a genuine error and reach out to us. We want to hear it and we cannot learn if we do not hear others' voices.
If you have an issue with the AUREA team as a whole, we are happy to receive constructive criticism and feedback at our email, contact@aromanticism.org. Our team works in many different time zones and availabilities, so sending us an email is the only way to guarantee a response from the team as a whole.
AUREA acts as a professional organization, not as an informal group. We ask that you engage with us as professionals. We are happy to work with individual activists, researchers, companies, and media organizations to present more concrete information about the aromantic community to the world. We also love working with other aromantic, a-spec, and LGBTQIA+ organizations worldwide, and encourage people to work towards more localized aromantic events & organizations.
Inclusivity Policy
AUREA believes that every person on the aromantic spectrum should feel safe in the community we help create. Furthermore, it is important to us that aromantic people see experiences similar to theirs reflected in what we do. Our goal is to further the recognition of all kinds of aromantics and to contribute to building a community in which everyone is on equal footing.
Aromantic identities unify the community, but many of our other experiences, characteristics, and backgrounds differ. AUREA is committed to embracing those differences and continually representing all aromantic people to the best of our ability.
We strive to build an organization that is dedicated to all aromantics, keeping in mind the needs of those who have been marginalized due to their:
sociocultural background, including race, ethnicity, nationality and class,
romantic, sexual and other orientations and identities, regardless of how established they may be,
gender identities, regardless of how well known they may be,
ability and neurotype,
language,
and other aspects of identity beyond these
We encourage our audience, you, not to hesitate to communicate with us whenever our work can be improved to better serve those values. All feedback we receive about the website is thoroughly reviewed and at the start of every team meeting we discuss how we can further our anti-oppressive practices. To see how we’re doing with our anti-oppressive practices, please refer to our anti-oppression organizational chart.
Team Members as Individuals
While individual team members have various social media (including Discord, Tumblr, Arocalypse, etc.) accounts & may participate in discussion about aromantic topics, they are not speaking on behalf of AUREA unless they preface it with “On behalf of the AUREA team”. Individual team members’ opinions are their own.
Nonetheless, we find it important that individual team members behave in accordance with our values. If individual team members become involved in conflict in aromantic spaces, especially if these go against our policies, they are required to report this to the team (and the community accountability group if deemed necessary) so that they can be held accountable for their actions. Likewise, if team members notice other members violating any of our policies, they are also required to report this to the team.
If you believe a team member to be violating any of our policies as individuals, please make us aware at contact@aromanticism.org or through our feedback form.
Contact Policy
We ask that if you need to communicate with the team, you contact us via our official email: contact@aromanticism.org. Please do not communicate to the team via an individual member unless they reach out on behalf of AUREA.
You can generally expect to hear back from us within 48 hours. If you do not hear back from us within a week of sending your email, please let us know.
Feedback & Transparency Policy
Feedback is important to us. While some feedback may be able to be resolved quickly by one or two specific team members, some feedback needs to be handled by the entire team. This can take up to 72 hours to finalize because of varying time zones. We do take all feedback into consideration.
Transparency is also important to our organization. If you are interested in seeing where donations go, you are welcome to review our financial transparency document. This document is updated regularly to reflect new expenses and donations.
Please be aware that some tasks (adding more team members, new projects, news articles) take time to organize. Our organizational planning often extends out several months to help team members organize their time appropriately and to produce the most thorough results.
Organizational Values Assessment Document
The purpose of this policy is to outline how AUREA connects with other organizations. This covers official and unofficial partnerships, whether temporary or permanent, and other kinds of relationships, formal or informal. Following this policy should ensure consistent assessment of AUREA's relationships with other organizations, so that AUREA can support its community and refer the community to other supports in an ethical manner.
The full document is quite long, so to save space for now it can be viewed in as a Google Doc here.