The Neighborhood Design Center's Values

Before we began working in-depth with HGVenture, our DEI consultant, we had a set of belief statements used publicly on our website and in proposals. But we failed to understand that while team members were coming to the work with some conception of values-based process and work, there wasn’t necessarily a lot of coherence around our shared values as an organization.

Our belief statements really needed further investigation, debate, and understanding and our shared values needed to be defined and reinvigorated.

 During a panel discussion with our team from HGVenture last winter, Merrell Hambleton reflected on that process and why we started it in the first place:

“We hadn’t gone deep enough. That was the case for a lot of nonprofits in 2020, and it became just egregiously apparent both with the pandemic and with the uprising around racial justice in the country. So, I think we realized both in our work and also in our attempts to talk about our work during that time that there wasn’t a clear sense of what we were rooted in and what our shared problem definition was and that we were all on the same page about why we were doing the work we were doing and what made it important.”



Hear more about our process of examining our values, what we learned, and how it helped us to become a more values-driven organization. Watch the recorded panel discussion.