Mission and Values

For more than five decades, HOBY has inspired young people to make a difference and become catalysts for positive change in their home, school, workplace, and community. As America’s foremost youth leadership organization, HOBY has a long history of successfully motivating young people to develop into outstanding leaders.

Much of the work at HOBY involves young people exploring and identifying their unique leadership skills. Every student is different, and there is no attempt to impart a predefined set of attributes onto HOBY participants. We stress self-knowledge, uniqueness, and authenticity, not conformity. Students learn to mobilize their own unique traits and are exposed to particular leadership principles that they can explore and incorporate in a fashion that is true to their own personality.

Some of these include:

  • Consciousness of self: values, emotions, and beliefs that motivate you to take action
  • Behaving with consistency, genuineness, and honesty toward others
  • Personal commitment as energy that drives the collective effort
  • Collaboration: empowering others and self through trust
  • Common purpose—working with shared aims and values
  • Collective analysis of issues at hand and tasks to be undertaken
  • Maintaining civility in light of differences in viewpoint
  • Conflict resolution: creating group consensus
  • Conscientious citizenship: thinking critically about societal issues
  • Service as a way to become an effective, active citizen in the community

Core Values

HOBY stresses volunteerism, integrity, excellence, diversity, and community partnership. Emphasizing these key organizational values, we execute our vision to motivate and empower young adults. Through understanding and action, based on effective, compassionate, and service-driven leadership, students learn to make a positive difference within our global society.

Volunteerism

The heart and soul of our organization. We recognize and value what volunteers can achieve by working together. We believe our programs positively impact our volunteer leadership who are the heart of our programs as much as the youth and communities we serve.

Integrity

Forms the foundation of our organization. We grow our organization based on interactions that promote mutual trust and respect with our stakeholders and partners. We strive to ensure the highest level of organizational effectiveness by continually reviewing our programs and processes to improve quality and efficiency

Excellence

We strive to continually raise our programs to new levels of excellence. We encourage entrepreneurship and innovation in business, education, and social responsibility. We develop creative solutions to address challenges and to utilize opportunities. We believe that leadership skills can and should be continually improved and refined.

Diversity

We value and embrace diversity. We seek out views that reflect all walks of life and reflect those views in our programs. We are sensitive to the special needs and diverse backgrounds of individuals, our students, volunteers and our communities. We give all individuals an equal opportunity to be heard and to benefit from our programs.

Community Partnership

We value community partnerships. We recognize the importance of working with community organizations to strengthen our programs by helping us provide all young people the opportunity to participate in and benefit from a HOBY program. We value the input we receive from our community partners and strive to work together cooperatively and constructively for the betterment of all.