Mission, Vision & Core Values

All of the people who surround us at work—our coworkers, our clients, our volunteers and our community partners—are worthy of our full respect, regardless of their cultural, religious and ethnic background, age, gender, income or class, or English proficiency.

We demonstrate this value by:

• Giving every person we serve and serve with our very best
• Listening to the people we serve and actively seeking their input on a regular basis
• Honoring the people we serve in the way we treat them, the way we portray them and the way we speak about them internally

We serve humans and we are humans ourselves. We acknowledge and celebrate that to be human is to inhabit a body that must be cared for, to have a mind that must be challenged and to possess a spirit that must be nurtured. We demonstrate this value by: 

• Taking the time and allocating the necessary resources to address our clients’ emotional, spiritual and physical needs as a part of our everyday service provision—even if these aren’t valued by our funders or required by our contracts. 
• Taking care of our own physical, emotional and spiritual needs and challenging each other to do so as a team.

Our organization is stronger when a variety of voices and perspectives are invited to contribute to our work and make and carry out decisions. Our community is more vibrant when we make space for new practices, beliefs and traditions. We demonstrate this value by:

• Intentionally seeking out and selecting employees and board members who add to our organization’s diversity, and changing our practices if needed to ensure they are able to fully engage in our work.
• Honoring the diversity of the people we serve by actively seeking their unique perspectives and publicly celebrating their cultures, languages and beliefs.
• Seeking to collaborate with organizations and faith communities that are as diverse as Northwest Arkansas.

We were founded as grassroots, community collaborative and this remains a central part of our identity. We cannot exist apart from our community. We demonstrate this value by: 

• Including our community in everything we do: every big strategic decision we make, every program we offer, and every challenge we navigate. 
• Listening to our community and actively seek their input. 

We can only fulfill our vision if we empower our community and our clients to engage with each other directly in a healthy, sustainable, respectful way. The longer we hold onto the role of mediator, the longer we impede this vision. We demonstrate this value by:

• Choosing to teach the people we serve (both community members and refugee clients) instead of doing it for them, even if it takes longer on the front end.
• Supporting the people we serve when they come to us with ideas and initiatives and saying yes to those whenever possible. 

Excellence means giving something your very best. It does not mean achieving perfection. We do not value perfection. We value excellence. We demonstrate this value by: 

• Doing our very best on every task, in every situation, and at every level of the organization.
• Ensuring that we have adequate capacity to run a program or perform a service with excellence before committing to it. 
• Asking the people we serve to give us and our community their very best and celebrating excellence when we see it in them. 

All who come across our organization, whether in our office, online, or out in the community, feel they belong with us. We demonstrate this value by:

• “Rolling out the red carpet” for every new family that arrives in our community.
• Modeling and mirroring our clients’ example of hospitality in our office.
• Adjusting our language and practices when we discover that they alienate members of our community or make them feel unwanted.