Expanding Access, Creating Connections, Unleashing Potential

Our Commitments

Avenica understands that the road toward justices and equity is riddled with minefields and roadblocks and is actively and openly committed to navigating that path with our partners and candidates to help create environments of access, inclusion, and prosperity. To that end, Avenica pledges to encourage, empower, and embrace diverse people, thoughts, and perspectives internally and in our interactions with the greater community. We pledge to promote, provide, and aspire to professional development opportunities while actively working to dismantle systems of oppression and implicit bias. We are committed to:

• equitable treatment and elimination of discrimination in all its forms.

• diversity in all staff, volunteers, and audiences, including full participation in programs, policy formulation, and decision-making.

• recognition of the rights of all individuals to mutual respect.

• inclusion of practices rooted in social justice.

• exclusion of practices rooted in oppression.

It is our duty as an organization, our privilege as agents of change, and our vocation as global citizens to ensure the mark we leave on the community is one of growth and opportunity creation. We are committed to excellence. And, as our core values state, we believe in authenticity, dreaming big, taking ownership, constantly working to be better, and togetherness. It is through our commitments and convictions that we will lead the charge in bringing about prosperity, access, and opportunity while unleashing human potential.

Acknowledgments

Avenica’s headquarters is located on sacred Dakota ground in the area that we have come to know as Minneapolis. This acknowledgment shows respect and gratitude for the stewards of this land prior to its colonization and serves as a reminder of the hardships and injustices endured by Indigenous People as their land was taken away and their people were relegated to the margins of society.

Avenica acknowledges the contributions of Black Americans through forced labor wrought by the inhumane act of slavery and the historic trauma that followed. This acknowledgment shows gratitude and respect to the people who built much of this nation with their bare hands and serves as a reminder of the hardships and injustices endured by Black Americans who were taken from their lands and forced to toil in what we now know as the United States of America.

The complicated, cruel, and intertwined experiences of colonization and slavery are deeply rooted in the very fiber of our country and impacts every aspect of our present day. Policies and practices such as redlining, school funding models, highway placements, and the lack of ready access to meaningful career opportunities are only a few byproducts of the aloofness and/or malice practiced by power-holding institutions.

Avenica also acknowledges the barriers systemically placed ahead of women, members of the LGBTQIA community, persons struggling with physical disabilities and mental health conditions, and other often-marginalized groups. We commit to actively working to remove these obstacles to inclusion and dismantling all systems of oppression.