Happy Birthday to TNP!
Today is a magical day -- it’s The Nora Project’s fifth birthday! While we’re cuing the confetti in our home offices, we thought it fitting to share some reflections on the blog today. In anticipation of this milestone, we took time over the past year to take stock of all we’ve learned, who we’ve become, and where we’re going.
We celebrated our success
Over the last five years, The Nora Project has grown in ways that we only dreamed of when we were first building the organization and our programs. In this time, TNP has reached 13,000 students in 514 classrooms from 72 partner schools across the U.S. and Canada. There are still so many classrooms to meet, but for now, we take pause and celebrate this incredible growth.
Light orange rectangle with a pendant banner hanging from the top containing light blue, dark blue, and orange striped flags. The text reads “514 classrooms, 13,000 students reached, 72 partner schools.”
We got clear on our values
After engaging with our board of directors and our educator advisory board, we honed in on the values guiding our work and decision-making. At the core of everything we do, are these four foundational values:
Empathy: Listening to others’ stories, imagining life from their point of view, and standing by them in times of need and celebration;
Inclusiveness: Believing that diversity, accessibility, dignity, and genuine love and care are always required, no matter the context;
Impact: Incorporating best practices, embracing creativity and innovation, welcoming feedback, and adjusting course when needed to maximize outcomes and transform lives;
Integrity: Placing honesty, transparency, friendship, and reliability at the heart of all stakeholder relationships.
We rewrote our mission and vision statements and tagline
What does The Nora Project do exactly? We got real about that this year, and believe that our greatest value is in building our partner educators’ capacity and providing quality curriculums so that they can do the work of bringing inclusion to life at school. Our new tagline, Building inclusive classrooms, piggybacks on our new mission statement: Promoting disability inclusion by empowering educators and engaging students and communities. Both reflect the everyday steps needed to move us toward our long term vision: A new standard in education where ability diversity is expected and valued in every classroom.
The new TNP logo with two children holding hands, one standing and one sitting in a wheelchair, circled. The Nora Project, building inclusive classrooms is written next to it.
We improved and diversified our partnerships
After ratifying an anti-racism statement, we reviewed our contracts and brought in minority and women-owned businesses to support and improve our work. We underwent extensive internal anti-bias training and an organizational equity audit. We hired Alex Parker to create the Pivot Points companion guide that will allow all of our teachers to explore the nuance of intersectionality with their students this coming school year and beyond. We partnered with Jo Tolley, a UK-based disability rights advocate, to offer a mentorship program to high school students with disabilities as they transition to adulthood.
We updated our website
Working alongside the design experts at Ready Pretty Marketing and the web accessibility experts at Georgia Tech’s Center for Inclusive Design and Innovation, we launched a new, more accessible website that features a high contrast palette, clean fonts, screen reader compatibility and streamlined keyboard navigation among other features.
As we celebrate today, we know that the transformation is never-ending and we are constantly striving to become a better version of ourselves. We’re going to cherish this milestone and our growth over the years, while keeping our minds focused as we continue to transform into a more impactful, more diverse, and more secure organization.