Affirmed September 1, 2020

The Mission of the Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuary Partnership (APNEP) is to understand, protect, and restore the significant natural resources of the Albemarle-Pamlico estuarine system.  As such, the Partnership is committed to addressing environmental inequities by continually reevaluating our partnerships, protection and restoration efforts, and engagement processes through the lens of increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion throughout the Albemarle-Pamlico estuarine system.

Our partnerships with governmental, academic, community, and nonprofit organizations are the foundation of how we work; through our funding processes, representation within citizen advisory groups, strategic planning efforts, and long-term ecosystem priorities, we can foster a Partnership that is inclusive of the diverse perspectives within the region and which works to identify, protect, and restore the region’s significant natural resources in ways that increase equity among its communities. By facilitating communication and collaboration among different organizations throughout the region, APNEP seeks to leverage its resources and those of its partners to accomplish more together than any individual organization could alone.  This can only be accomplished with a diverse array of perspectives and voices.

Increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion through our work is integral to our ecosystem-based management perspective, which views human communities as a vital component of the overall ecosystem. We are committed to approach this work in a way that is inclusive of diverse connections to the environment, inclusive of perspectives that may otherwise be unheard, and increases equity through ecosystem protection and restoration efforts. We are also dedicated to broad inclusion in our educational and engagement efforts.

Specifically, we commit to:

1. Engage communities and stakeholders that are representative of the broader populations within our programmatic boundaries to implement the 2012-2022 Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan (CCMP) and the Partnership’s Mission.
2. Incorporate diversity, equity, and broad community inclusion as an ecosystem outcome(s) with associated objectives and actions into the 2022-2032 revision of the CCMP.
3. Work to engage diverse communities and populations in the organization’s decisions and diversify the perspectives represented within all of Partnership’s management and citizen advisory groups.
4. Conduct an internal organizational diversity, equity, and inclusion self-assessment and provide externally facilitated trainings for management and citizen advisory groups and staff as warranted.
5. Report annually on actions taken to enact these commitments in our Annual Work Plan.