Posted on June 19, 2025
Creating a culture where everyone feels respected, heard, and empowered.
Everyone has a fundamental right to feel included in their workplace and community, although feeling “included” and “belonging” are not quite the same thing.
Gregory Miller
President/CEO Penn-Mar Human Services
To “belong” is to feel accepted and valued within a group or community, to experience a sense of connection with others, and where one’s presence and contributions are recognized and appreciated.
At Penn-Mar, we’ve spent time listening, learning, and looking inward to explore how our team members can feel more connected to our mission — supporting people with intellectual and developmental disabilities to live courageously and pursue their best life.
Our “Belonging” initiative doesn’t stop at fostering connection, and it is not designed to be a top/down process.
It is rooted in listening to individual voices and navigating the complexities of shared organizational experiences. By fostering open, candid conversations, we seek to bridge the gaps between diverse work responsibilities and create consistent practices that uphold respect, mutual understanding and equitable treatment across all levels.
Our approach for ensuring that all Penn-Mar team members feel a sense of belonging is to dig deep, leveraging the different life experiences we all have, in a positive rather than negative way, to unite rather than divide us.
The WHY of all this is to constantly improve our ability to attract and retain good team members and most importantly, for them to have a positive impact on the lives of the people with disabilities we support.
Foundationally our research with team members identified three specific areas needing improvement:
Connections: How we can better connect to the organization as a whole.
Consistency: Create consistent practices throughout the organization that are not situationally based on a person’s job or boss to foster respect and better job performance.
Leadership: Improve engagement between leadership team members so everyone understands what is going on at different levels of the organization.
To address these core areas, we created four workgroups under the umbrella of a Belonging Council to find ways to turn these identified goals into everyday practice.
The groups are now meeting on a routine basis to establish creative ways to make Socialization, Learning, Consistent Practices and Communications operational and integral to our mission to ensure that all team members feel respected, heard and empowered.
There is no “sell by” date to this process. In fact, we have publicized the names of Council members to allow for direct contact to keep the dialog open for any additional issues team members feel should be addressed.
Part of my agenda as the leader of Penn-Mar is to become a student of what our workforce is experiencing. As an organization we are saying we want to improve specific areas. The work of the Council is to ensure that we do.
So far, the feedback we have received from our initiative has been very validating. We are on track to do the right things to ensure a cohesive and dynamic culture.
You can train people to be proficient in anything, but you can’t train someone’s heart if it isn’t in the right place. Treating our team members with respect speaks to their hearts. It has a direct impact on the quality of support they provide each day to people with disabilities. When they feel respected, they are successful. And when they are successful, we remain true to our mission.