Practice: How We Treat Others Begins Within the Walls of Our Organization

You feel the culture before you understand it. When you walk through the doors of OCALI the staff wants you to feel welcome and it feels natural that they would want to do so. After all, serving others is part of our purpose.

As the director of OCALI, I am an advocate for the heart of our mission – which is to understand people uniquely. We inspire change and promote access to opportunities for people with disabilities. Our external role is to support our clients to create the most accessible, inclusive and positive environment for each and every person. To be successful, I know we must to do that with each other first, but how do we get a positive internal culture to trickle down directly to the people we serve?

Believe it or not, even though inclusion is what we do, it’s not always easy to practice what we preach. We know that how we understand, respect and treat each other begins within the walls of our organization, but achieving that doesn’t always come without intention and practice.

The OCALI +PLUS initiative gives us tools to do a better job of supporting a positive internal culture. To practice a behavior, you have to be able to identify it. The P in +PLUS, stands for “Practice What We Preach.” You can only improve skills if you practice them, so every day we work toward making ourselves better at understanding one another. 

We start by discussing OCALI +PLUS during onboarding and then we don’t stop. We talk about our internal culture at every meeting and how the things we do apply to that culture. We encourage an inclusive mindset, the respectful sharing of opinions, feedback and open lines of communication without judgement. Every voice matters and we encourage positive intent.

We must remember that just as we serve our community, we must serve each other. It’s important that our teams feel valued and understand their own, unique contribution to the OCALI mission. My role is to make sure an inclusive mindset begins at the top. Our leaders have to model appropriate behavior in order to set the expectation that our employees will offer one another mutual respect.

Inspiring change and promoting access means bridging gaps for the individuals we serve and you can’t build those bridges without a team. We will continue to practice what we preach and strive to be a strong foundation for the programs and people we support.