Todd Goodwin is chief executive officer of John F. Murphy Homes Inc.

John F. Murphy Homes Inc. has been a member of the Lewiston-Auburn community for nearly five decades and is Maine’s largest nonprofit human services organization exclusively serving individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

From our first Lewiston group home in 1978 to our newest Auburn Intermediate Care Facility opened this fall, and from our first Margaret Murphy Centers for Children school opened in Auburn in 2000 to the latest addition currently under construction at our largest school in Lewiston, we have always and everywhere fiercely pursued our mission of making lives better for children and adults with differing abilities.

We are proud of our reputation as a dedicated, innovative and compassionate human services provider that works with individuals and families in furtherance of dignity, independence and inclusion for all people. Our greatest strength as an organization is rooted in the talent and commitment of our 933 employees.

These are people from all walks of life and backgrounds who show up every day with genuine authenticity, choose to embrace our mission and work tirelessly toward the goal of making our community, our region, our state and our world just a little bit better.

Whether it is a direct support professional working with adults or an educational technician working with children, I stand in awe of them every time I see them in action. They represent an excellence that transcends the job of working at John F. Murphy Homes.

Our workforce is quite diverse. Whether it is age, ethnicity or cultural heritage (or some other category of “difference”), we welcome this richness and depth of perspective. We are much stronger for this diversity and it helps us to meet an ever growing demand for services within the disability sector in Maine. It indeed takes a village.

Our Somali staff form a substantial proportion of our employee base. Simply put, we could not do our work without them. I agree with Steve Collins in his column of Dec. 3 (“Somalis are not ‘garbage’ and Mainers should be outraged”).

The individuals of Somali background who we are honored to have as employees at John F. Murphy Homes and our Margaret Murphy Centers of Children are decent, upstanding, thoughtful and hard-working professionals.

Like all of our employees, they display an ethos of care and concern for our collective community while upholding standards of accountability, learning and growth. In my book, these are exactly the kind of people that we should all be proud to know and work with. We are grateful for that.