Vision, Mission, Values, and Commitments

Our Vision

We envision our lives grounded in human connection and partnership. We believe work is one part of our humanity, not our essence or entirety. We believe we can have what we need to be our full selves, live our full lives, and do our best work. This is the future of equitable work.

Our Mission

To create the future of equitable work, Leverage to Lead’s mission is to build a coalition of organizations across all industries invested in creating systems and practices that center humanity.

Our Leadership Commitment

In support of our mission, Leverage to Lead’s leadership team endeavors to create stability for our team, clients, and partners so they can take risks, disrupt, explore, innovate, imagine, and create.

Our Values and Commitments

Connection is the essence of our humanity, which we all need and deserve. Partnership is the vehicle for practicing equity and inclusion in connection. In service of connection and partnership, we hold the values of relationship building, collaboration, and co-creation in our work together and with our clients.

We commit to these values by embodying:

• Trust
• Risk-taking
• Shared purpose
• Imagination
• Rest

Our organization’s values and commitments are the foundation for prizing our humanity and our inherent connection across all our differences. We are partners with each other and our clients in co-creating the future of equitable work.

Relationship Building

We hold the value of relationship building because partnership means we can respect our individual perspectives and beliefs as we work together with shared values toward a shared purpose. We strive to understand others the way they wish to be understood so that all of us can feel seen, heard, and supported.

To build relationships in support of partnership and connection, we commit to:

• Leading with vulnerability by sharing what we need and how we feel.
• Extending deep regard and compassion for ourselves and each other as we take risks, practice, make mistakes, and celebrate our growth.
• Setting and communicating boundaries that allow us to meet others where we can do our best work.
• Practicing the inner agility of being aware of our emotions and making intentional decisions about how we navigate the conflicts and tensions that naturally arise when we encounter difference.
• Exercising our agency and holding accountability for the impact of our decisions. 

Collaboration

We hold the value of collaboration as foundational to how we define partnership. Because our differences are not a problem to be solved, collaboration means we grapple together to create a way forward together.

To collaborate as partners and in connection, we commit to:

• The ongoing practice of perseverance , which supports leaning into tension, discomfort, uncertainty, and conflict with the desire to strengthen our relationships.
• Open and responsive communication , deep listening, and discussions that aim for illumination rather than resolution.
• Disrupting urgency and giving our work the necessary time, space, and flexibility.
• Exhibiting curiosity to interrogate the assumptions, biases, or judgments that difference may surface.

Co-Creation

We value co-creation because it requires equity in relationships, multiple perspectives, and the willingness to imagine without constraints. Co-creating a path forward that does not yet exist, into a future that does not yet exist, asks us to value the process alongside the outcome.

In co-creating the future of equitable work, we commit to:

• Upholding the integrity of our work with high standards for behaving in alignment with our values.
• Demonstrating trust in the process of transformation through relationship, collaboration, and partnership.
• Inviting the risk-taking necessary to shape a new path.
• Our shared purpose of building nurturing and supportive structures that allow us to thrive and be whole.
• The imagination and hope to build what’s never been built before.
• Caring for ourselves by asking for and taking the rest we need to restore, connect with ourselves, and do our work sustainably.