A Mission Statement for My Family

This Juneteenth, my husband and I pledged to create a family mission statement and actively live up to the integrity we detail.

We got the idea from Dr. Allison Briscoe-Smith during a Commonwealth Club and Common Sense Media webinar on Parenting in Support of Black Lives Matter.

I’ve done many of these exercises through my #marketing work and even have a personal mission statement. (That one is: "To be someone those close to my can count on and inspire ongoing curiosity and fun.")

But I hadn’t yet thought of this on behalf of our family. It makes perfect sense.

When you put things in writing, it's real. It's something you can repeat out loud and teach (to put it in context, we have a two-year-old and a one-year-old). It reminds us to act or speak out when necessary.

I'll share our process.

• Our first assignment was to come up with a list of what we each believed to be our family values. We did this on our own and then booked a meeting on our calendars after the kids were asleep to discuss, agree or disagree, and narrow down the field. This is too important to do with distractions. Our combined work that night looked like this.

• We each mulled this over for about a week and met up another night to create the final group of overarching values with their subset iterations. We did this as a shared Google Sheet.

• Our last assignment was to write the actual mission statement. We each came with ideas to our last meeting, and crafted the final version together that night. Here's what we committed to:

It currently lives as a white board in our living room, and we read it out loud most nights after story time and before bed. We also try to incorporate the values throughout the day so when the two-year-old throws something on the floor after we cleaned up we call that "disrespectful."

Eventually, we'll create a more permanent way to display it. Right now, it's the meaning that matters.

#missionstatement