Relational Culture Checkup

Know your Organization's Relational Culture

Your organization’s relational culture plays an essential role in ensuring that all young people, regardless of background or circumstances, have the nurturing, support, and guidance they need to learn, grow, and thrive.

Search Institute’s Rooted in Relationships Model identifies two critical components of the relational culture: supporting structures and relational climate. Relationship-rich organizations have climates that are intentional about relationship-building, inclusive of all youth, and equitable in meeting youths’ individual needs.

The Relational Culture Checkup—focused specifically on youth-adult relationships—is a five-minute online check-up for leaders and staff, designed to help you identify what your organization is doing well and uncover areas for improvement.

This checkup will lead you through the two components of the relational culture, assess each of these, and report the results to help you reflect on the core mindsets, skills, practices, and supporting structures needed to cultivate and sustain a relationship-rich culture.

Be sure to answer all of the questions to receive your real-time results at the end. Once you get your results, check out the recommendations for ways you and others in your organization can reflect on, and learn more about how to promote a relationship-rich culture.

Before you get started, choose how you want to complete the Checkup: Organizations can choose to take the Relational Culture Checkup as a group or ask individual people to complete the tool independently. If you decide to take the Checkup as a group, we recommend reviewing the Relational Culture Checkup Group Guide as you get ready to approach this shared work.

• A note about this tool: The Relational Culture Checkup is a tool for self-reflection and conversation. It is a way for organizations to get a quick sense of their relationship-supporting structures and relational climate. The Checkup was not developed as a compliance, rating, or performance tool.

• What happens to your information? Your responses are safe, don’t worry – we won’t share your results with anyone. We plan to aggregate anonymous data from all the responses to establish national trends related to the relational culture of youth-serving organizations. However, we will not be able to trace individual responses to specific people or organizations. Your responses will remain anonymous.

The Relational Culture Checkup was developed as a product of the research and practitioner insights gathered from the Relationships for Outcomes Initiative funded by the Einhorn Family Charitable Trust and the Cultivating Connections Project funded by the Carlson Family Foundation.