The Orbis Cascade Alliance values “open communication, innovation, agility, discussion and collaborative decision making that elicits and includes the perspectives of each member.” And our vision emphasizes “equity in higher education.” We frame these values and vision within diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, and we strengthen our efforts to achieve them through support and accommodations provided to all member library personnel and Alliance Central Staff.

Affirming Diverse Identities

• We acknowledge and use chosen names and pronouns to facilitate an inclusive and respectful environment.
• We invite any contributor to Alliance work to request updates of their names and pronouns included in our documentation through a Personal Information Change Request.

Creating Supportive Spaces

• We strive to balance open communication with confidential spaces in response to community and contextual needs.
• We create opportunities for anonymous communication.
  • Our Anonymous Ask form allows anyone to contact an Alliance program with feedback, questions, or ideas without identifying information being recorded.
  • We enable anonymous questions in the Q&A option for Zoom meetings.
• We protect the privacy of member library workers’ identifying information.
• We determine whether or not to record events (meetings, community calls, trainings, and more) based on multiple factors, including but not limited to context and background, community needs and concerns, and speaker/trainer requests.
• We provide access to recorded media and related files at varying levels, depending on the content and community need. Such access levels may include but are not limited to:
  • public and discoverable after prior notification to participants,
  • unlisted and linked from the Alliance website,
  • unlisted and linked from a password-protected Alliance webpage, and
  • unlisted and retained for a limited time according to Alliance guidelines before removal.

Providing Accommodations

• The Alliance supports captions and transcripts for all web meetings and recordings.
  • We enable captions for all Zoom meetings, which allows participants to show captions and/or transcripts.
  • We include captions and transcripts in recordings posted to our YouTube channel and website.
• We present opportunities for event participants to identify additional accommodation support when needed.
• We provide accessible documentation, including for meeting agendas and notes, and we remediate documentation when barriers are identified.