(And a reminder of what really matters)

Late last month, Mission Partners was announced as the winner of a Silver Stevie Award in the Best Women-Run Workplaces category of the annual Stevie Awards for Women in Business. This is a particularly special acknowledgement, as it celebrates the deep and careful work of our team during the height of the COVID pandemic, and our intentions to not just survive those challenging days, but to thrive beyond them.
Here are a few things that the judges shared about our team:

• “Mission Partners is true to its core values and is transformative in its modus operandi and its commitment to giving back to the community through projects that tackle inequalities and build capacity. The organization is flexible and attentive to the needs of its women staff and their parent duties, especially through challenging times.”

• “A great company that seeks to be impactful by providing strategic planning and communications services for purpose-driven organizations. Utilizing communication as the “greatest tool for bridging gaps, building empathy, and moving towards a more just and equitable future”.

I share this news with you here not in a self-congratulatory way, but as a reminder of just how important it is to invest in women-run workplaces who every day are changing and challenging what work can be, creating meaningful employment and flexible workspaces that together contribute to the building of an economy that works for everyone, especially caregivers.

Mission Partners is proud to be among the 7.7 million women business owners worldwide, just as much as we are proud to be among the much smaller number of Certified Women-Owned businesses and  the even smaller, but perhaps most impactful women-owned B Corporations. 
As I shared earlier this year, Mission Partners is also a founding member of the TIME’S UP Care Economy Business Council, a diverse coalition of hundreds of business leaders committed to building a comprehensive caregiving infrastructure and creating a stronger, more resilient economy for everyone.

At Mission Partners, we have always believed that business has a responsibility to take action. The intertwined health, economic, and racial justice crises of the last year and a half have forced over two million women out of the labor force and tens of millions more to curtail their hours, pass on new professional opportunities, and sustain untenable levels of stress while working and caregiving to support themselves and their families. The situation for women of color has been especially dire, as they endure crisis levels of unemployment, while their communities confront historic racial injustice and suffer the disproportionate impact of the COVID pandemic.

And so yes, we share this news with you in the spirit of excitement and as a moment to be celebrated.  But we also take this moment as a reminder of just how much more we can and should be doing to ensure our workplaces can work, for everyone, and for the long term.

As we look toward 2022, we are already planning our deepened commitments to support women and girls, and to continue building on the investments we’ve made in this first 5 years of business.  If you are interested in learning more or working with us to reimagine your own workplace, then drop me a line.  Together, we can write a better ending to the business story.

Carrie Fox

[email protected]