Today, CHAI joins the global community to celebrate Zero Discrimination Day.
As a global health organization, CHAI’s staff understands the critical importance of eliminating discrimination and stigma to ensure that all people are treated with dignity and fairness and have access to quality health care.
People are dying unnecessarily from AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and other treatable diseases. Marginalized populations are often the most vulnerable to disease, and stigma, discrimination, and exclusion can prevent people from receiving life-saving treatment.
CHAI’s programs span cultural and geographic contexts – from Africa to Eastern Europe to Mesoamerica to Asia – to ensure treatment is available for all populations. We believe that access to high-quality health care is the right of all people and we keep this mission and our values at the center of our work.
We are committed to no tolerance for discrimination within our own workplaces. As we mark Zero Discrimination Day, we are proud to have recently unveiled a critical core value that highlights this pledge:
As an inclusive workplace, we promote and integrate the principles of fairness, respect, equality, and dignity into CHAI’s culture. We take a firm stand against discrimination and harassment and foster an environment where people with a multiplicity of personal characteristics, including race, color, religion, sex or gender (including gender identity and gender expression), sexual orientation, ethnicity, national origin, age, disability, HIV status, political or interest group affiliation, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, parental or pregnancy status, or any other characteristic, are embraced wholeheartedly and are valued for the perspective they bring to achieving our mission.
In 2016, CHAI developed and rolled out to the organization a Respectful Workplace Training program. Thus far, the program has trained over 1,200 of CHAI staff across 24 of our countries and provided opportunities to forge critical and challenging conversations around diversity and inclusion in our workplace and across the cultures and contexts in which we operate. This training and the on-going conversations it has encouraged continue to strengthen our commitment to tolerance and respect. Our staff at CHAI are empowered by our values which support us in achieving our mission of saving lives.
On Zero Discrimination Day, and every day, we reaffirm this commitment to end discrimination, promote diversity and eliminate stigma.
