Current e-Journal
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March 03, 2026
Uh-oh, your values are showing!
In this week’s Systems Change Newsletter…
- Invitations and Announcements
- Catalytic Thinking Exercise: Uh-oh, your values are showing!
- Resources to Further Your Practice
Invitations & Announcements:
Kicking off this podcast season with a GREAT one!!!
What are the factors that actually create social change? Who better to ask than Renee Wittemyer from Melinda French Gates’s foundation, Pivotal Ventures! Renee shares powerful stories about making a difference in communities around the globe. This will be the interview folks are talking about – don’t miss it! Listen here…
Catalytic Thinking Exercise:
Uh-oh, your values are showing!
It was several years ago, during one of Creating the Future’s demonstration projects. The group was talking about the “conditions for success” for their community to become a more humane place to live. As they considered the question, “What would folks in your community need to value?” they quickly noted the importance of trust and respect.
They talked about the need for people in their community to respect people across different walks of life, with different lived experience. They talked about the actions they could take to start breaking down some of those silos.
Then we asked the tough question:
Do you find that level of trust and respect inside your organization?
Silence.
One brave soul stepped forward. She described the silos within their organization, the ongoing battles between different programs - not just about funding, but about feeling disrespected by folks on other teams. The more she talked, the more it was evident that whatever they wanted their community to value, their own internal work was not modeling that in any way.
We are all so good at pointing fingers at others, wishing they valued the same lofty things that we value. However, when we turn the camera towards ourselves, we see that we may not be walking the very talk we wish others were walking.
We wish that folks in our community would see past their differences and find what they have in common. Yet our teams are just as siloed as our community members.
Or we wish our community leaders valued the voices of our community members, yet we don't permit community members - or even staff members - to attend board meetings, to share their own voices with the organization’s leaders.
Today's Catalytic Thinking exercise is therefore all about walking the talk of your values, inside your organization and out.
Try this
There is no more important question your group’s leadership can be addressing than to align your actions with your values. This is not about deciding what work to do. This is about deciding how that work will get done.
These are some of the richest conversations a board and/or leadership team can have.
Step 1: It all starts with your vision
Reaffirm that your vision statement is about what you want life in your community to be like – the WHY of your efforts.
- If your work were 100% successful, what would life be like for all the people living in your community?
- What is the ultimate outcome, the ultimate why of your work for the people in your community?
Step 2: Your values are key to the success of your vision
As you consider the conditions that need to be in place for that vision to be reality, ask what community members would need to value in order for that vision to be reality.
- What would your community members need to value?
- What would need to be important to them?
- What would your community members need to care about as the most important thing, in order for your vision for life in your community to become reality?
Step 3: Now turn the camera on yourselves.
For each attribute you mentioned, what would that look like inside your organization?
- What would those values look like for how your team members work together, inside their teams and across teams?
- What would those values look like for how your human resources department sees its job? Or your accounting staff?
- What would those values look like for how people are welcomed when they call your organization on the phone? Would they speak to a human or a prerecorded message?
If we are to get beyond the status quo, this is not just about transforming what is happening out there in the community. It is first about transforming how we be with each other, inside our own efforts.
Those efforts could be inside an organization or inside a family. Walking the talk matters in every aspect of our lives.
Activist Grace Lee Boggs famously noted that we must transform ourselves in order to transform the world. That starts with matching our walk to our talk, using our values as touchstones for every decision we make and every action we take. Because the list of values posted in your lobby is meaningless if those values are not put into action.
That is why walking the talk of our values is so deeply embedded in every bit of the Catalytic Thinking framework. Because being the change we want to see means walking the talk of our values.
Resources to Further Your Practice:
- WORKSHEET: This free workbook has tons of questions to help you articulate your core values. Download it here…
- LISTEN: In this episode of the Creating the Future podcast, the CEO of Justice Funders talks about the power of vision and values to create change in communities. Listen here…
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