Our Core Values
To Our Beloved OCC Community,
At Origins Collaborative Care, we’re big fans of the work of Brené Brown, and we’ve been deeply inspired by her book Dare To Lead: Brave Work, Tough Conversations, Whole Hearts.
In it, Brené challenges us to consider our deepest core values—ones that truly represent how we wish to be in the world as well as the kind of culture we want to create at Origins Collaborative Care. It wasn’t difficult to choose values we felt strongly about. Each of us easily named twenty. The challenge was limiting it to three of them. (She actually suggests two, but we couldn’t help ourselves!)
The point of having only two or three values is that it really clarifies what we care about most so that it can serve us in guiding all our behaviors and decisions—especially the tough ones. In other words, what values are so central to who we are and what we care about that they serve as guideposts for testing everything we do?
Brené asks us to consider three questions as a litmus test for deciding on whether or not we’ve chosen the right ones:
Do these define us?
Is this who we are at our best?
Are these filters we can use to make hard decisions?
Ultimately, we arrived at three of our most intrinsic values:
Integrity, Compassion and Safety.
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Integrity
We love Brené Brown’s definition of integrity: "Choosing courage over comfort; choosing what’s right over what’s fun, fast or easy; and practicing our values, not just professing them." Integrity holds us accountable to our other values, too, such as kindness, honesty, openness, courage, fairness, equality, gratitude, patience, respect, trust, understanding and vulnerability.
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Compassion
Compassion means “to suffer together.” Among emotion researchers, it is defined as the feeling that arises when you are confronted with another's suffering and feel motivated to relieve that suffering.
It was our founders’ motivation to alleviate suffering that fueled their passion to develop more effective healing approaches and compelled OCC into existence in 2021!
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Safety
Safety and connection are biological imperatives. For mammals, and especially humans, relational safety is as much of a survival concern as physical safety is. We need to feel safe in relationship to ourselves and others in order to be in a state of healing and repair. Safety is at the core of all healing. Personal issues such as physical illness, stress, trauma, anxiety, depression, isolation and interpersonal conflict, as well as systemic issues such as racism, oppression, sexism, homophobia (all forms of hatred), political unrest, corporate greed, poverty, crime, addiction, war, and even climate change, are all symptoms of a dysregulated autonomic nervous system (perceived threat and disconnection) playing out in both our personal lives and on a collective level. Safety is the antidote, and we heal in community.
So, Dear Reader, these are our guiding principles for how we wish to be in the world, in both our large scale decisions and our moment-to-moment thoughts and behaviors. These values represent how we want our Members to feel in our care—as well as how each of us at OCC wants to be treated.
We’re all human, and each of us will sometimes fail. If ever you feel that we haven’t been upholding our core values, we invite you to hold us accountable—using these same core values to communicate. When in doubt, we will ask ourselves:
Does this have integrity?
Is it compassionate?
Does it engender safety?
We envision a world where everyone is safe to be who they are, with all our human frailties. We want people to always feel held, nurtured, cared for and supported. Until then, we’ll begin our work here, within our loving OCC community, built on integrity, compassion, and safety.
With Love and Appreciation,
Micaela, Jessica, Christene, Alexandria, and Ellen