People: Invest in our most important asset, our people

Goal 2: Orbis is an inclusive organization that embraces diversity and equity across all aspects of our work and prioritizes partnership with other diverse and equity-focused entities.

Within our organization, this includes ensuring that our staff and leadership composition reflects the diversity of the people we serve, that every Orbis employee feels empowered to bring their full self to work, and that our policies ensure equity of opportunity for all team members. For our work, this includes formally mainstreaming diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) into our program design to reach those who are most in need—especially girls, people with disabilities, ethnic minorities, and displaced persons—with culturally competent care.

Over the next five years we will:

• Live Orbis’s values and engage staff more effectively: Accountability, commitment, trust, caring, and excellence are our organizational values, and we want to ensure all our staff are demonstrating behaviors that reflect these values every day. We will develop and launch new initiatives and accompanying tools directed towards building a stronger culture and ethos that nurtures, engages, and strengthens our global team.

• Prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion: Advancing equity within our work also requires us to ramp up our pursuit of equity within our organization. Our new organization-wide DEI strategy will recognize the need to better formalize this work and outline clear plans for integrating DEI within our organization and our external partnerships. Bringing diversity in all forms into Orbis, into leadership roles, and onto the Board of Directors remains our objective.

• Create a culture of continuous learning and improvement: We will deepen our culture of learning and continuous improvement throughout the organization, creating an environment where staff feel encouraged to test out new ideas and integrate learnings. This will include improvements in our internal communication and knowledge management systems, as well as enhanced employee engagement strategies.