Back to School! Plus, why our values are verbs.
Team Letter | August 13, 2023
Aug 13, 2023
Happy Monday, Alpaca!
It’s Back to School Week!!!! The amount of celebration we have this week is BONKERS – 2000 gorgeous back to school packs, huge progress on our new website, sponsors secured (to the tune of $35,000!), and excellent communications with our principals and districts. DANG, team! That’s the way we kick things off!!!!
Since it’s the beginning of the school year, I wanted to go “back to basics” this week to remind all of us of our core values as a company. It’s like that first day of school when you get your syllabus and hear the rules of your classroom! So let’s get started.
As all of us know, Write Thank You Notes is our company’s first core value. That’s pretty uncommon as a core value, so I thought I’d share with you why our values are what they are.
Sure, our core values could have been: Gratitude, Empathy, Storytelling, Equity, and Quality. But as a company, we’d rather be in motion, working in specific and clear ways to elevate the profession of education.
So each of our core values is stated as an action, to remind us to take action in support and celebration of educators, and because our values should define our actual work, not just our ideals. Think about which value is easier to live out: “Gratitude” or “Write Thank You Notes.”
Here are Alpaca’s core values, and a little about how we live them:
Write thank you notes. Writing thank you notes takes time, effort, intentionality…and school supplies! Most importantly, it shows direct support for another person, and that’s what we’re all about.
Listen to teachers. We think celebrating teachers begins with listening carefully to the ways they feel valued, supported, and celebrated. When we spend our time listening, our product and service gets better and better.
Tell stories. This value goes hand in hand with Listen to Teachers. One of the ways to celebrate educators is to make the stories of their work seen, heard, and known. Teachers are remarkable people managers, operational leaders, organizers, and advocates, among so many other roles. When we tell the world those stories, it recognizes great work while also helping the rest of us understand this profession better.
Elevate every educator. It’s been important to us from Day 1 to ensure that we have ways to celebrate educators in every type of school. It’s why we built a sponsorship fund to support under-supported schools, and why we ask in every project “Is there a way to make this available to educators who wouldn’t otherwise get to participate?”
Bring out the best. For us, this one is two-sided: first, we want to bring the best products into our packs because high quality brands give teachers the tools to do their best work. Second, every action we take in the company should bring out the best in our customers, our community, and our own team.
As an added bonus, action-oriented values makes onboarding new employees and performance reviews pretty easy! If you look back on your work and you are doing all of these things, you’re probably doing your job well. And if you don’t know how to embody one of these values, that’s a perfect topic for your next 1:1.
I knew Alpaca was the right company for me to start because when I sat down to define these core values, they felt like they’d been written forever and I was just discovering them. And seeing how each member of this team puts them into practice every day is all the proof that I need to know this: We’re onto something big, and it starts with writing thank you notes.
Let’s go do this thing, Alpaca!
KB