What’s in a name? Rethinking the PEPY acronym
September 15, 2011PEPY Voices: PEPY’s Chan Chhorvy Hay shares her passion for teaching and leadership
September 21, 2011by Stephanie Boegeman
Discussing core values at PEPY's Strategic Planning Retreat
Photo Credit: Unknown
Those of you who have been part of the PEPY family for years know that we have pretty particular ideas about how we want operate as an NGO: share the lessons we’ve learned, invest in people, and transparency in our decisions among them.
We thought last month’s Strategic Planning Retreat was an excellent opportunity to articulate our values in a more comprehensive way. To get the ball rolling, we asked everyone at PEPY to write down the values that are important to them (learn more about the process here). We put all these together and looked for the stand-out common themes. From these themes, we devised our list of 12 core values that are central to how we work and play here at PEPY:
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Commit to our unending potential for improvement
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Think unreasonably. Dream BIG
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Focus on impact, not inputs. Invest in people, not things
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Be strategic in our choices, and thoughtful in our plans
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Collaborate, both within and beyond
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Create and sustain a culture of open feedback
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Work with, not for
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Do more with less. Be responsible in our environmental and economic choices.
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Be humble in success, transparent in failure and share the lessons we learn
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Nurture the creative and quirky PEPY culture
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Stay connected with the PEPY family – wave until you can't see them anymore.
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Live the principles we promote. Work with integrity.
Why put so much time and effort into creating this list? We want these values to guide how we create and develop our programs, how we make hiring decisions, how we evaluate our individual and collective actions, and how we ensure that all our team members are connected to PEPY’s culture and working practices. By understanding and articulating the values that are important to all of us here at PEPY, we hope that our core values will act as a litmus test for decisions we make in the future.
For more information about what each individual value means to us, and why we have chosen it to represent our work, check out our core values on the PEPY website.
