Statement On Diversity

We welcome everyone to our site. If you see anything here that makes you feel excluded, please tell us.

The real Growth House is in San Francisco, a city known and loved around the world for its diversity and love of life. San Franciscans get their diversity training by riding the bus every day. We include respect for diversity as one of our screening criteria for links on this virtual version of our San Francisco home. Sites that are disrespectful of others, or just clue-impaired, won't make it into our resource database.

As an international site we consciously seek out resources from around the globe which address the special needs of various national, cultural, and racial groups. We are honored to have been cited as an international resource by several of our awards. We don't have any links to sites off-planet yet, but we like the Vulcan IDIC motto "Infinite Diversity In Infinite Combinations" that was popularized by the television program Star Trek. We make a special effort to keep track of resources for cross-cultural issues in death and dying. To find resources for specific groups please use our search engine.

Regarding religion, facing death often helps people focus on spiritual realities. We believe in freedom of religion, and freedom from religion. Whether you are a secular humanist or a Hindu, Jewish or Shinto, Christian or devoted to Mother Earth, you are welcome here. While the majority of our links have no religious content, we do include links to sites with a variety of beliefs. We do not link to religious sites that insist that everyone must share their point of view.

Because our policy is to celebrate diversity rather than segregate, we have chosen to place links to Lesbian and Gay resources openly throughout the site rather than clustering them all in one closet. The same inclusive approach is used for sites which provide special services to members of particular racial or cultural groups.

Nelson Mandela, a true champion of human rights and racial diversity, used the phrase "rainbow nation" to sum up an inspiring vision of unity with diversity in his 1994 inaugural speech in Pretoria as the President of the Democratic Republic of South Africa:

We have triumphed in the effort to implant hope in the breasts of the millions of our people. We enter into a covenant that we shall build the society in which all South Africans, both black and white, will be able to walk tall, without any fear in their hearts, assured of their inalienable right to human dignity - a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.

We would like to close by sharing with you a poem by Marianne Williamson from her 1992 book A Return to Love.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate,
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous?

Actually, who are we not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small does not serve the world.

There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that
other people won't be insecure around you.
We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.

It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously
give other people permission to do the same.

As we are liberated from our own fear,
Our presence automatically liberates others.