COMMITMENT TO DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION

Orange County United Way stands for equity and justice. Together with our stakeholders, we work actively and collaboratively to ensure inclusive opportunities and non-discriminatory access to education, health, financial security, and housing for every person in our community. We envision an inclusive, responsive, and equitable Orange County.

To this end, Orange County United Way will intentionally and explicitly focus on removing barriers for those most harmed by them. To fully achieve this, we must understand and address the underlying factors that impede our progress. We will challenge practices based on racism, sexism, and other historical, systemic, and current forms of discrimination to create more inclusive communities. Together, we will intentionally and actively address all inequities.

We pledge to be a leader in the fight for equity through the following actions.

Organizationally, we will:

• Value and embrace differences in race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, religion, gender, disability, nationality, age, sexual orientation, and viewpoints as a critical component to our success in serving the needs of our community.
• Take an internal look at United Way and assess our diversity demographics of leadership and employees.
• Strive for greater diversity within our board, committees, staff, and volunteers that reflect the community we live in, and work to ensure that we have a wide-range of voices and viewpoints represented in our strategic planning, program development, and implementation.
• Continue to provide equal opportunity in employment decisions including recruiting, hiring, promotion, compensation, benefits, and training, without regard to race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, religion, gender, disability, nationality, age, sexual orientation, or any other legally protected class.
• Treat one another with dignity and respect in all activities. We are committed to a professional work environment free from any form of harassment including physical, psychological, or verbal harassment.
• Provide ongoing training for staff and leadership to support these commitments.
• Develop and implement a detailed action plan, evaluated annually, that aligns with our objectives, both internally and externally, with specific actions, goals, timelines, and results.

In the Community, we will:

• Support policy and funding decisions that strive for social justice, equity, and equal opportunity.
• Continue to assess the systemic gaps that create inequity, and engage in public awareness, advocacy, and program implementation to close those gaps.
• Invest in housing solutions through landlord incentives and advocacy for affordable housing; job training to provide inclusive and equal opportunities for all people to earn a living wage; broad access to healthcare; and opportunities for all children to receive a quality education.
• Allocate resources to help those most adversely challenged within low-income communities.
• Be inclusive of the immigrant population to support equal access to services and resources.
• Support organizations that have adopted diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and practices.
• Cultivate and strengthen relationships by inviting a broad representation of community, business, and faith organizations to increase their involvement with us.

To achieve the above, we are taking action to ensure that we gather stronger data, to better understand who we are and who we serve, evaluate our work and impact, and take an active and collaborative role in the development of core programs and policies that will result in a more inclusive Orange County.

November 2, 2020