Our Commitment to Equity

Rising Solutions is founded on the principles of empathy, humility, and curiosity and we live these values in all we do, from our hiring practices to our work/life balance, to our relationship with partners and local communities.  Our team believes in the dignity and the intrinsic worth of every human being. We welcome, affirm, and support young people and adults of all abilities and disabilities, experiences, races, ethnicities, socio-economic backgrounds, sexual orientations, gender identities and expressions, religion and non-religion, citizenship and immigration status, and any other category people use to define themselves or others. We strive to create safe and inclusive environments that celebrate diversity and foster positive relationships.

Additionally, our expertise in social innovation is rooted in working with communities that are historically marginalized or have experienced trauma. Being equity-minded requires an understanding of the cultural, historical, and gender issues that exist as inequities in society are also inadvertently embedded in our solutions. When working with underserved or underprivileged communities we deploy an Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed framework which outlines six principles: safety, trust, peer support, collaboration, empowerment, and cultural responsiveness. We always consider whether our practices breach safety (principle 1) or trust (principle 2). We strive to consider strategies to enhance peer support (principle 3), collaboration (principle 4), and empowerment through giving voice and choice (principle 5) as ways to achieve equity while contextualizing our solutions to be culturally responsive (principle 6).

Finally, we believe that it is our responsibility to commit to a life of learning and growth. Unconscious bias and systems of inequality, once unveiled to us, require our intentional effort to call out and dismantle them. We welcome and celebrate feedback on how we can our language, our technical approaches, and how we show up in the world. We hold to this universal principle “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly now, love mercy now, walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”