Our vision is to support future generations of heart-centered, diverse leaders who are prepared to respond to the challenges of their time with focus, resiliency, and compassion for themselves, their communities and the global environment.
Our values are how we bring our vision to life on a daily basis.
Mission-centered
- We believe in the transformative power of mindfulness and compassion. We recognize youth and their unique voices, measure the success of our work through the embodied positive transformation of teen participants and their communities, and commit to addressing issues of equity in all that we do.
Collaboration
- We value input from all members of the community, including across power differences, recognize individual differences and work collaboratively to harmonize them, and strive to embody a model of shared leadership.
Compassionate Authenticity
- We individually carry ourselves with integrity, and as a team, we value open, honest communication in all situations including difficult feedback conversations, which provide us the opportunity to show each other compassion and learn from our mistakes.
Trust, Mutual Support, and Celebration
- We embody mindfulness, joyfully celebrate our work together, trust that each member of the team is working to attain our shared goals, and commit to exploring our blind spots together while embracing humility, vulnerability, self-awareness, and deep listening to each other.
Excellence
- We value effectiveness and efficiency in using the resources (human and financial) we have available to deliver high-quality programming with reliability, proactivity, and attention to detail.
We are committed to addressing issues of equity in all that we do. Explore our Equity and Interdependence Dashboard which includes our current commitments and future goals, with details on our demographics, accessibility policy, partnerships, and staff training. It also provides a list of community resources from our teachers and participants.
As part of our commitment to exemplify collaborative leadership, we have engaged in a multi-month, multi-step process to define our values. Through the mindful means of research, communication, and reflection, we came to see not only those positive values which are currently reflected in our organization and those to which we aspire, we also identified behaviors which do not align with our highest intentions and which we want to transform. These “unexamined values” may be reflected in our intermittent tendency to:
- Achievement at all costs – We compromise the wholeness of our lives and well-being for the perceived needs of the organization.
- Efficiency at all costs – We are willing to compromise our well-being, positive emotional tone, kindness, warmth and levity in order to accomplish our tasks.
- Growth at all costs – We pursue growth for the sake of growth, measured by quantitative metrics.
As we continue in this process we will work to address these unexamined values and transform our organization to be fully aligned with our vision in everything we do.