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WHO WE ARE

What moves us and why we do this work.

Our Commitment to Diversity, Equity,  Inclusion,  Justice, and Belonging.

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Justice, and Belonging (DEJIB) are explicit in the values of GOOD TO BE GOOD and foundational to who we are as people—within the organization and outside of it. 

We believe the quality of these values are enhanced and strengthened by working and learning from people with diverse experiences, perspectives, backgrounds, and ideas—with a particular and crucial emphasis on marginalized and equity-seeking people. 

While DEJIB has been a fundamental pillar of our mission since our founding, our commitment has not only been to advance DEJIB at GOOD TO BE GOOD but to amplify DEJIB on a larger scale beyond us. 

 

For us, equity starts with addressing the instructional, systematic, administrative, and system-level inquiries that disproportionately affect women and gender-diverse people. We implement equity by increasing access to our programs, services, and advocacy to the communities most targeted by gender inequality, education modules, and leveraging privilege to unlock interlocking systems of power.  

As a BIPOC-led organization, we are always seeking ways to increase the representation of underrepresented minorities and identities, such as those who identify as Black, Indigenous, and Racialized (BIR), in all of our working relationships and space—because we know so well that our people are our greatest strength. Having our teams reflect the incredible diversity of the people we serve is equally important to us. 

As a small yet mighty team, we are constantly looking for ways to evolve the implementation of interventions designed to achieve equity and hold ourselves accountable as we do this work. Interventions include sponsorship, allyship, community collaboration, and preparing women and gender-diverse people to be in positions that provide experiences for leadership and decision-making roles. 

Inclusion

We are always seeking ways to improve, especially when it comes to having a greater percentage of BIR and individuals from equity-deserving communities within our employee and Board of Directors population, in particular increasing the representation and decision-making power of Black and Indigenous employees and members within GOOD TO BE GOOD. 

Our future plans include hiring and collaborating with consultants and leaders to help us work toward tangible goals: enhancing our talent pipelines to generate a more diverse pool; helping to ensure authentic representation at all levels of the organization; ensuring Black and Indigenous representation are present and honoured as we develop or expand programming; ensuring our efforts support equity-deserving communities as aligned with our mission; and investing in BIPOC and gender-diverse employees and team members. 

We aim to create spaces and environments where inclusion equals diversity plus equity. We do not believe a space can be truly inclusive if the space is inherently racist, sexist, misogynistic, ableist, homophobic, and transphobic. Our actions for building inclusive spaces include self-reflection, difficult conversations, assessments, and awareness of how and who we are excluding and how we may be perpetuating discriminatory practices.

As we expand the organization, our goal is to prioritize and conduct a regular cycle of audits to understand if our communications, advocacy, developmental content reflect our DEIB commitments and identify gaps and measures that need to be put into practice and become normative.

Our team will continue to influence the organization’s DEJIB direction and coordinated efforts going forward and hopefully, inspire positive change.

All GOOD TO BE GOOD job and volunteer postings include the following institutional diversity commitment statement:

Committed to attracting and retaining a diverse staff and Board of Directors, GOOD TO BE GOOD will honour all experiences, perspectives, personalities, and unique identity. Together, our community strives to create and maintain working and learning environments that are inclusive, equitable, and welcoming, and do not reinforce colonial power imbalances, narratives, derogation, assumptions, and attitudes.

Our Guiding Values and Principles

Our core values are steeped in compassion, inclusion, justice, equity, interconnectedness, radical love, responsibility, and the protection of human rights, which steer our long-term commitments and practices. 

Shared values are central to who we are, what we do, and how we do it. These values are principles and standards, which we use as lenses through which all organizational decisions are viewed and embodied. We model a values-based culture by holding these principles within our practice and ways of being.

We see GOOD TO BE GOOD as part of a more extensive, interlinked web of various impact-driven activities directed toward the common purpose of gender equity. We work with values-aligned communities to advance our mission, not simply stimulate organizational growth. We continuously pursue opportunities to work with our community members, volunteers, and partners to address gender inequities in our community and ignite compassion-led change to ensure that the human rights of all women and gender-diverse people are realized. 

We believe compassion has the power to connect us to each other and ourselves. Compassion is available to everyone, generates an understanding of our humanity, and can lead to action. 

We believe service is universal and a way to build, play, care, and support one another as equals. We support relationships and experiences that understand the importance of service and its lasting ability to harvest change for everyone.

We believe that radical love is at the core of many justice-seeking movements because of its commitment to the liberation of all beings. Radical love embraces sorrow, joy, grief, grace, forgiveness, active listening, trust, hope—all parts of humanity that fill and sustain our wells.  

In a world that over-values traditional philanthropy and charity models that reinforce the saviour complex, we push for spaces that engage a “solidarity over charity” philosophy and practice that underpins a shared purpose and justice-based approach to social change. We explore ways to destabilize and move away from colonial, top-down white-centric ideas about “what is giving” and its relationship to power and privilege. By strengthening our solidarity and collective care, we diminish the chances of replicating and perpetuating harm of the inequalities we seek to address and build power with, not over, the people we serve. 

We are equity-focused and committed to centering the experiences of women and gender-diverse people who are often under-represented, under-funded, marginalized, and vulnerable members of communities. Our commitment to ensuring equitable access is rooted in an intersectional approach to our programs, services, and initiatives. We consciously engage communities with mutual respect to understand perspectives and lived experiences to make progress. 

We acknowledge and are willing to talk about the causes and forms of social injustice and work on challenging and dismantling them. We are committed to understanding and owning our place in the work and fostering accountability with those we work alongside. We hold space as a way to develop confidence in the power of agency as the driving force of responsibility and self-determination. 

Fostering community is a requisite foundation for transformative justice, meaningful connection, sustainable development, and all that we do as an organization and as people. Alongside diverse communities, we are committed to addressing the cycles of gender inequality and social injustices by learning, supporting, empowering, and being guided by wisdom and grassroots movements working to dismantle inequality-producing structures of white supremacy, patriarchy, and colonialism on local levels and in powerful, loving ways.