News

At Trinity Services, we support more than 4,000 people with developmental disabilities and mental illness across Illinois, employ approximately 1,000 staff members, and rely on the support of countless more friends and neighbors.

Our organization exists to help people, and it exists because of people.

We are Trinity Strong because of the diversity that people bring to our organization, but we cannot continue to benefit from and celebrate this diversity without also addressing the inequity and systemic oppression that impacts many members of our community.

As we transition from Pride Month in June into Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) Mental Health Month in July, we must address the systemic racism and oppression that are very real in the world today.

I have listened as Trinity’s friends, neighbors, colleagues, and people we support have spoken out about how they have suffered because of racism and discrimination. It is our responsibility and our mission to help people flourish and live full and abundant lives. We cannot fully or effectively do this without working to dismantle systemic racism and oppression of any kind, for any reason, including disability, gender, sexual orientation, religion or age, in addition to race.

As an organization, Trinity has always been committed to treating all people fairly and with respect, but it is obvious that we need to continue to actively pursue equity at all times, work against injustices and work to help facilitate change in the broader communities of which we are part.

We are proud to be accredited by the Council on Quality and Leadership, or CQL, which is equally committed to equality for BIPOC. CQL is currently updating its Basic Assurances®, which is a tool we use to evaluate our services and supports. CQL will include revisions specific to topics of racism, social justice and equality in the updated manual, and we look forward to incorporating these revisions into our evaluation process.

Beyond this, we remain committed to fully listening to and responding to the needs of the people we support, our staff members, our supporters and our community members so that we may continue to provide the highest-quality person-centered services and supports that we possibly can. By definition, person-centered services leave no room for any systems or actions that would oppress or cause harm to a person, and by definition, the highest-quality services must be fully accessible to people of all races, genders, sexual orientations, creeds, ages and abilities.

Sincerely,
Thane Dykstra, Ph.D.
President and CEO