By Olivia G. Ford
Strong values have always been The Well Project's driving force – and a key reason we have remained a trusted source of information, advocacy, and support since our founding in 2002. A crowning achievement of 2024 is that, for the first time, we put those values into words – engaging in a process to make explicit and name what underpins our work.
It was an honor to collaborate with members of our staff, board of directors, and community advisory board to elucidate not specifically what we do, but how we go about doing what we do, what guides us in choosing particular projects or partners or members of our team – what animates our work.
The process began with a conversation about personal and collective values between our staff and The Well Project's board of directors chair, Linda H. Scruggs, in the middle of 2022. The organization was beginning to grow – and transitioning from a primarily consultant-based team to a staff-based team. While we were, then as now, an all-remote team working from different geographic locations, the values by which we worked with our staff, community advisory board (CAB), and board of directors had always been something of an invisible filament that knit us all together. In this transitional moment, we had a desire to make that thread visible to anyone who might join our team or encounter our work – in part to enable us to be accountable to those felt values.
Over the next two years, we engaged in conversations, exercises, and draft reviews with our staff, CAB, and board of directors, as we honed in on the essence we intended to communicate regarding The Well Project's commitments and motivations for the past 22 years and the many years to come.
In late 2024, that "labor of love" resulted in these five core values:
Women-led response
- Our unwavering focus on women across the gender spectrum is the essence of all that we do
- We model practices we want to see in our communities, our movements, and the world
Centering those most impacted by HIV
- We believe those most affected by change must guide change-making
- Our work centers Black women, Latinas, and other women of color living with HIV across the gender spectrum while creating spaces and opportunities for all
Community at the heart
- We foster connections among women living with and affected by HIV, rooted in compassion and care for one another
- We elevate self-care and advocacy as integral parts of caring for community
Evidence-based and always learning
- We ground our work in research and community-based evidence
- Our language and approach evolve as new insights emerge
Collective power
- We support and stand with women in claiming agency and building power
- We take action to ensure our communities are never an afterthought
As part of our annual fundraising drive, we invited some essential voices from our community to speak to just how deeply each value matters. You can hear them all in the video below:
Read The Well Project's mission, vision, values, and strategic plan on our About Us page
