Draft of Revised Mission Statement

As some of you know, we've been working on redrafting our mission statement. While our mission is strong we had a pretty tough time articulating what we do. I think most companies have that issue at times as well.

I'm not one who thinks missions are "blah, blah, something funders want to hear, blah, blah, BS." It should be a company’s reason for existing. It should guide everything the company does. It should speak to people outside as well as inside the company. It should keep a company accountable, as companies should live up to their mission.  That's a pretty tall bill.

When I was at Theatre Wit for their anti-Conference, Martha Lavey spoke about living with your mission.  She said Steppenwolf was guided by three core values: ensemble, innovation and citizenship. She also acknowledged that their mission was "deficient". It actually perked me up a little bit to hear that openly acknowledged. If they're struggling with that, we shouldn’t feel too bad.

After about three months of working on it, consensus building, and a lot of great advice and feedback from pretty smart folks, we had multiple people try to craft a statement. The board took stabs at it, company members took stabs at it and then Seth collated them all into one place to look at them side by side.

At the following board meeting, as a group the board redrafted five versions that were then taken to the company for feedback and testing at the next meeting. Each of the drafts had one sentence that the company grabbed onto and liked, but none of them really nailed it. So we were back at an impasse

Hearing Martha and David Schmitz talk about Steppenwolf's mission and values inspired me to go back and craft a statement. I took the best pieces of each of the drafts and tried to put them together into one statement. It was a bit clunky, but I sent it out the company and board for feedback. From their feedback I made some tweaks, strengthened parts and too out some redundancy and came up with this:

Halcyon Theatre connects people, transforms our borders and ascends towards a more just union.

Halcyon Theatre is dedicated to social justice by creating a community that both respects and celebrates our similarities and differences. We are fiercely committed to making the stage as diverse as the city of Chicago; presenting new voices from inadequately represented communities, as well as recasting classic works to showcase their contemporary relevance. By bridging cultures, celebrating diversity and fostering an open dialogue, Halcyon works towards an enhanced mutual respect and understanding between artists and audiences from across our richly diverse city.

It's still a draft, but I'd love your thoughts and feed back as well. (Here is our old one for comparison.) What do you think?

On a side note: I'm pretty happy that, while I crafted the draft of statement, only one sentence comes from me. And even that one was inspired by someone else. All I did was stitch it together from the groups ideas and words.

Thoughts?