Mission and Learning

Mission and Learning at Good Shepherd Services

A Mission Guided by Our Values 
Our commitment to fair treatment and human dignity is central to everything we do. We’ve made progress, but we also recognize that this work is ongoing and requires consistent effort. We’re always learning, growing, and evolving as an organization. 

Milestones we’ve achieved over the years.

2017 

• We made fair treatment and human dignity a strategic priority. 

• We created the LEAD Council to enhance our work to welcome all people into our organization.  

2018 

• We began the process of hiring its first Chief Mission and Learning Officer. Hired in May 2019, she started helping the agency set strategic work plans and directions for the Mission and Learning work.  

2019 

• We created our first land acknowledgment and partnered with the Lenape Center in 2020 to produce an agency-wide one. We established annual celebrations to recognize the legacy of America’s first peoples, aligned with the nation’s holiday in November.  

• We changed our mission statement to be guided by our values so that we could hold ourselves accountable to creating a better GSS and society.  

2020 

• In collaboration with leaders across the agency, we designed core competencies aligned with our values and mission. 

• We co-founded the NYEEC to broaden the sector’s vendors, contractors, and consultants, making our best effort to ensure we support small businesses and local vendors. We believe our efforts will contribute to a healthy, growing local economy. 

• We have developed employee resource groups for staff members to enhance their growth and learning and to build community. 

2021 

• We launched a Mission and Learning Institute that supported 22 nonprofit leaders across the child welfare sector. In 2024, we launched our second iteration of the Institute with 28 GSS leaders. Leaders engaged in 140+ hours of focused learning to enhance their alignment with the organizations mission and values.  

• We launched a fair hiring practices process. That process transformed our hiring so that we were sharing decision-making power beyond hiring managers, elevating our Mission and Learning competencies striving to broaden backgrounds within our leadership structure.  

2022 

• We flipped our executive team leadership to be more representative of the populations we partner with in NYC.  

• We hosted a series of conversations with the executive team to decide on a Mission and Learning-informed executive team workplan. We ran those conversations with the senior leadership starting in January 2024 and, as of March 2025, we are in the process of creating an Agency Leadership Team (ALT) workplan. 

2023 

• We started looking at staff salary lines and thinking about how we could raise the salaries of frontline workers. This included using a fairer process for a Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA). 

• We provided coaching for our executive team members to develop their ability to lead more fairly.  

2024 

• We launched a vendors database to support a healthy, growing local economy. 

• We produced four self-paced trainings and relevant implementation guides or toolkits.  

• We turned the Mission and Learning-specific core competencies created in 2020 into a new competency tool that will be used for the performance management process.