The 7 Core Values of Stuff You Can Use

Author: Elle Campbell, Co-Founder

Here at Stuff You Can Use (the people who make Grow Curriculum), our team is committed to creating something good — not just good products for the churches we serve, but a behind-the-scenes company culture that is good for our team members, too!

Stuff You Can Use is committed to a culture defined by goodness. The Hebrew word for “goodness” you’ll see often in Scripture is tov. In the book A Church Called Tov, it’s described like this: a culture of goodness is a culture that will “resist abuses of power, promote healing, and eradicate the toxic fallout that infects so many Christian organizations.

Many folks on our team are witnesses to, and survivors of, toxic, abusive, or unhealthy cultures — both at church and at work. But we’re committed to building something better, both for the churches we serve and the team we get to serve with. One of the ways we do that is by structuring everything we do around these core values…

1. Helpfulness
2. Generosity
3. Fun
4. Inclusion
5. Excellence
6. Resourcefulness
7.Innovation

These core values aren’t just buzzwords or wishful thinking for the Stuff You Can Use team. They’re the values we base all of our decisions on. They’re the values we use to evaluate our work. And they’re values everyone on the team knows, so we can all hold each other accountable to them. Let me break them down for you. And feel free to steal them if they’re helpful to you and your church!

1. HELPFULNESS

Whenever we list our values, this one usually comes first because it is so central to who we are. At Stuff You Can Use, we want to help! Here’s how that looks when it comes to the stuff we make for churches, and how our team works behind the scenes.

• FOR YOUR CHURCH: If we’re not making stuff that helps solve your problems, we’re not doing our jobs! When we’re dreaming up curriculum, software, or other resources for your church, we ask things like…
  • What problems can we solve?
  • How can we make stuff that’s easy to use?
  • How could it be more editable and customizable?
  • How can we give you the support you need?
• FOR OUR TEAM: We want our company culture to be helpful (and not harmful) to the people on our team. That means we ask things like…
  • What problems can we solve for each other?
  • How can we make each other’s lives better?
  • How can we support our team members’ growth, both professionally and personally?
  • How can we make sure our team members are being helped (and not being harmed) by working here?

2. GENEROSITY

With our time, our stuff, our expertise, and everything we have, we always want to be generous! Here’s how that looks at Stuff You Can Use…

• FOR YOUR CHURCH: As ministry leaders ourselves, we know how much you give to the people you serve. That’s why we want to do everything we can to give back to you. So our team is constantly trying to figure out how to share more knowledge, give away more stuff for free, keep things affordable, and set you up with all the scholarships, discounts, or flexibility you need.
• FOR OUR TEAM: We want our team members to be generous with each other. At work, generosity can look like a lot of things, like…
  • Giving plenty of specific praise — and plenty of specific feedback, too.
  • Giving others credit for their work, both publicly and privately.
  • Assuming the best about each others’ intentions, especially when we’re busy or experiencing conflict.
  • Creating a workplace where team members feel well-supported financially, professionally, and personally.

3. FUN

It’s no secret ministry can be tough sometimes. But it should be so joyful, too! That’s why, in everything we do, Stuff You Can Use is all about keeping things fun.

• FOR YOUR CHURCH: Fun is essential to building relationships, and relationships are essential to discipleship. That’s why we create curriculum and resources that help you have fun with the kids, teenagers, families, and volunteers you serve! We also try to make our curriculum and resources fun for you to use as the ministry leader, rather than being another annoying thing you have to deal with every week. Oh, and when you talk to our team through a chat conversation or a call with a Grow Strategist, know that we’re looking for opportunities to add a little fun to your day, too.
• FOR OUR TEAM: The Stuff You Can Use team has never been accused of taking ourselves too seriously. We love the work we get to do, we love the people we get to work with, and we love finding reasons to laugh together. Our team is fully remote, but even though we don’t get to see each other in person enough, there is almost always a chaotic group text, Zoom call, or Slack thread happening somewhere.

4. INCLUSION

When we first launched Stuff You Can Use in 2011, and then Grow Curriculum in 2017, we were bothered by the fact that so many of the ministry resources available were made by similar kinds of people. We wanted to see more stuff made and led by people who represent the fullness of the Church — real everyday church leaders (not just professional curriculum creators), more folks from small churches (rather than mostly big, well-funded churches), more women, more people of the global majority, more people with disabilities, and more people who tend to get overlooked for one reason or another.

Why? Because when we are more inclusive behind the scenes, the stuff we create ends up being more useful to more people! That’s why we’re so serious about being inclusive with the things we make and the people we make them with. Here’s how that looks at Stuff You Can Use…

• FOR YOUR CHURCH: Whenever we create something, our team is always asking things like…
  • How can we include even more ministry leaders in what we’re making?
  • How can we make our resources useful in as many different contexts as possible?
  • Who are we not thinking about, and how can we do a better job of considering them?
  • How can we use our platforms to elevate people or groups who aren’t often elevated?
• FOR OUR TEAM: When it comes to the people we work with, we ask things like…
  • How can we help everyone on our team know they are safe and heard?
  • Whose perspective isn’t represented on our team, and what can we do about that?
  • What don’t we know about people whose experiences we don’t share, and how will we learn?

5. EXCELLENCE

We’ve all spent money on mediocre ministry resources that we kind of regret buying, right? At Stuff You Can Use, that’s not the kind of thing we want to put out into the world. Our team is obsessed with making excellent stuff! Here’s why and how…

• FOR YOUR CHURCH: Whether we’re creating curriculum, free resources, a free online conference, podcasts, software, or just writing you an email, we’re committed to making it awesome — because you are awesome, and you deserve awesome stuff!
• FOR OUR TEAM: If we want to make excellent stuff for you, it has to start with everyone on our team doing excellent work behind the scenes. That means we’re always striving to get our stuff done on time, and done well, so we don’t create more work or frustration for others. It means we contribute our very best. Valuing excellence means we fight to make things better inside our organization, not just for ourselves but for each other, too.

6. RESOURCEFULNESS

As church leaders, we all know how important it is to be creative with what you’re given. Whether it’s people, time, relationships, or finances, we are committed to being resourceful and using our stuff wisely! Here’s why that matters…

• FOR YOUR CHURCH: The way we choose to make our curriculum and tools has a direct impact on you! If we’re irresponsible or wasteful in the ways we spend our money or resources, it would force us to make our curriculum and other tools more expensive — which we definitely don’t want to do. By being wise with our resources behind the scenes, we’re creating extra space in your budget to help you make better use of your resources too!
• FOR OUR TEAM: Besides taking good care of you, resourcefulness helps us take good care of our team as well. Wasteful spending can cause unnecessary stress for any team, but financial transparency and accountability help us be equitable, fair, and generous with our team members.

7. INNOVATION

And finally, we always want to be innovating! If we’re just copying the same stuff everyone else is doing, that’s pretty boring. We’re all about thinking differently, trying new approaches, and discovering new ways to solve problems. But we’re not interested in innovating just for the sake of seeming cool or relevant, we’re interested in hearing the problems you have and creating new and needed solutions.

• FOR YOUR CHURCH: We’re focused on creating things for you and your church that don’t yet exist, that solve problems no one else has solved, or that solve old problems in new ways.
  • Our curriculum teaches Scripture in fresh ways and helps kids and teenagers see things in ways they haven’t seen before.
  • Our free training for church leaders gives you ideas, solutions, and inspiration that you may not have thought of before!
  • Our software gives you unique tools that are designed specifically for kids and youth ministry leaders and aren’t available anywhere else!
• FOR OUR TEAM: We’re a team made up of people who aren’t satisfied with doing things the way they’ve always been done. We learn from a wide variety of people and industries so we can better innovate within our own. We’re always eager to get better, try new things, and solve problems for you and for each other.

So there you have it! Those are the core values of Stuff You Can Use and how we put them into practice.

Each of these values was specifically chosen because these values help us continue to be the kind of company we’ve always wanted to be: one that is characterized by goodness. From the things we make to the people we impact, we want to leave things better than we found them. We’re not perfect. We won’t always get it right. But these values are the guides that let us know when we’re wandering off-track — and show us how to get back to where we want to be.

But your core values only work when you actually use them. So, if you’re trying to create your church’s core values for the first time or you’re trying to figure out how to make your core values more important, here are some things to ask.

• Are your values clear? Or do they need to be explained before they’re understood? The more simple and clear you can be with your values, the more likely people will remember and apply them.
• Are your values actionable? Or are they just goals or outcomes? Your values should be things everyone on your team can actually do and control right now, not goals you hope to someday achieve. For example, you can choose right now to be more helpful, resourceful, or generous! But since you can’t control whether or not you are “successful,” or “growing numerically,” or “making a difference,” those things shouldn’t be your values. You should definitely have goals, but remember your goals are the things you could someday achieve, if you consistently practice your values today.
• Are your values useful? Can your values be used to help you make decisions? Can they be used to evaluate whether or not something is working? Can they be used to help you hire the right people? Can they be used to let you know when it’s time to let someone go? If your values aren’t flexible enough to do all these things well, they might not be the right values.
• Does everyone on your team know your values? If not, how can you spread the word and integrate them into your team culture?

Okay. You know our team’s values here at Stuff You Can Use, but now it’s your turn! Whatever your church’s values are going to be is up to you and the kind of church culture you want to create! But whatever culture you decide to create, we hope you’ll join us in seeking to create a culture that can be described as tov. Safe. Healthy. Growing. A good place.