The Heinrich Böll Stiftung's collective mission on "Gender democracy, anti-discrimination and participation" is a key guiding principle for our organisational culture, our internal collaboration, our political education work, and our service departments.
The Heinrich Böll Stiftung's collective mission on "Gender democracy, anti-discrimination and participation" is a key guiding principle for our organisational culture, our internal collaboration, our political education work, and our service departments. It is based on the stiftung's mission statement on anti-discrimination and diversity. Our aim is to ensure that both our workforce and our target groups reflect the diversity of society, and that we build a working culture that is sensitive to discrimination.
As part of this collective mission, we are developing internal processes and tools that help to break down barriers, tackle marginalisation, and enable all people to participate in political and social spaces and processes.
We are committed to continuous learning; we repeatedly encounter gaps, try out new approaches, exchange ideas, and respond to diverse challenges. Within this process, critical reflection on our organisational structures is just as important as recognising what is working well.
Our aim is to empower all of our employees to relate the topics of our collective mission – in all their complexity – to their day-to-day work and interactions within the hbs and to give them form. We do this, for example, by organising a comprehensive range of training courses for our employees in order to expand our gender and diversity competences. We also have an employee-focused anti-discrimination policy in place that outlines the German General Equal Treatment Act (AGG), sets out our internal approach to discrimination in the workplace, and details specific prevention measures.
Our comprehensive range of in-house information and learning opportunities on topics relating to this collective mission, as well as stimuli for discussion and reflection, help to ensure that our employees take anti-discrimination, gender democracy, and participation seriously and make space for these issues in their work.
Guiding principles
The Heinrich Böll Stiftung is committed to ensuring that no employees, interns, scholarship holders, applicants, external service providers, or visitors are discriminated against or disadvantaged on the basis of gender, race, religion or belief, socioeconomic status, disability or chronic illness, age, or sexual or gender identity.
In line with our collective mission of “gender democracy, anti-discrimination and participation,” we work to identify, reduce, and eliminate structural discrimination and the disadvantaging of specific groups within the hbs. We seek to promote diversity and enable meaningful participation for all those who face disadvantages related to the characteristics mentioned above. At the same time, we actively advance gender democracy and advocate for gender diversity.
Equal treatment, appreciative communication, and respectful, trust-based conduct among all employees are fundamental to our self-understanding. We foster a management culture grounded in equal opportunity and sensitivity to discrimination, and we are committed to supporting work–life balance across diverse life situations — from parenthood to caring for dependents. We also ensure that appointment processes and committee elections are transparent and sensitive to diversity.
With regard to accessibility, we invest in accessible infrastructure wherever possible and strive to create inclusive workplaces. It is central to our approach that, when assessing whether behavior or actions are discriminatory, the determining factor is their effect — the outcome — rather than the underlying motive, intention, routine practice, or oversight that may have led to it.
Our goal is to become an increasingly diverse and anti-discriminatory organization. This requires advancing the implementation of our shared mission in a comprehensive manner — taking legal obligations seriously, fulfilling them in a progressive and exemplary way, and, where possible, going beyond them.