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On December 19th, Soccer Without Borders (SWB) was to chosen as one of Mogul's Top 100 Companies with Inclusive Benefits, a distinction recognizing those who are making enormous strides towards building more inclusive, equitable, and diverse workplaces.
As a youth development organization, we know how essential it is to practice what we preach. Every aspect of the culture of welcoming, inclusion, and belonging that we implement within our programs with youth, we also incorporate into our staff culture.
Our six mantras define this culture and were designed by a representative group of program practitioners from across our hubs. They are:
With staff from 9 different countries speaking 16 different languages, our team has a wide range of lived experiences in addition to being racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse. As an LGBTQ+ co-founder, we have prioritized inclusive and welcoming staffing practices since the very beginning, enshrining these in our core values of authenticity, process-orientation, equity, and a whole person approach. One example of living these values through our policies is our compensation benchmarking process, which ensures pay equity within the organization across locations, including equitable pay for our international teammates in Nicaragua and Uganda whom capitalist markets drastically under value and exploit. Our compensation philosophy and guidelines set wage ratios between levels and ties executive compensation to the mean compensation of full-time employees.
Ultimately, the best indicator of a healthy workplace is our retention, which has remained over 90% year-over-year on average for the last 5 straight years, including a 97% retention rate during Covid-19. We attribute this not to exorbitant salaries (we don't have those) but to listening to what staff value most, and being a workplace where everyone can bring their whole selves, every day. Most recently, we conducted a "Stay" Survey as a part of our Compensation benchmarking process, to determine what benefits staff say "keep them working here". Of ten indirect and direct benefits listed, staff ranked team culture, enjoyable teammates, inspiring leadership, and opportunities for professional development and growth above salary, time off, and other benefits like health care.
Thank you Mogul for selecting us and thank you to everyone in the SWB Community for doing your part to make SWB a truly inclusive place, both on and off the pitch!