Be Strong Families Board Approves New Strategic Plan & Embraces Youth as Core Programmatic Focus
"Defining success & determining operational and programmatic steps to get there has been a well-choreographed series of conversations throughout the last 18 months. All involved came eager to help create a strategic plan to carry BSF through 2025. The amount of collaboration & engagement warmed my soul.” — Nina C. Aliprandi
After more than a year of Discovering, Dreaming and Designing the Destiny for our organization, on Oct. 21, 2019, the Be Strong Families Board of Directors met and approved a new strategic plan. Be Strong Families’ staff, board members, RPEA members and training consultants met many times throughout the year to Discover the best of what is, Dream about what could be and Design what should be for our organization. Using Appreciative Inquiry as our primary tool for evolving the organization, we engaged in interactive small group activities and World Café conversations to assist us in the process of refining strategies and goals for our 2020-2025 strategic plan.
Traditionally, a strategic plan is understood to be important for any company—for-profit or nonprofit—as a road map, linking daily organizational decisions with a vision of where the organization wants to be at some point in the future—say in 3 to 5 years. Kaplan and Beinhocker (2003) analyzed the strategic planning processes of 30 companies—some with a history of success and others that had made serious strategic blunders. They concluded that the main value of strategic planning was to make sure that key decisionmakers are all on the same page: have a clear understanding of the important issues, basic assumptions, and general direction the organization plans to take. Strategic planning processes are learning tools. Katthe Wolf, Be Strong Families CEO understood this as she led the design of the Appreciative Inquiry-based, inclusive, and participatory process that would generate the agency's strategic plan. She also had a broader vision for the resulting product, "We wanted a plan that was graphic and expressed the energy of Be Strong Families; we wanted something staff could use and remember, something that wouldn’t gather dust and that could be used for tracking and reporting,” Wolf says.
The Design process for Be Strong Families' strategic plan began on July 29, 2019, almost a year from the initial Discover meeting on July 23, 2018. Once again, Yoland Trevino (facilitator), BSF staff, and board members (several of whom now represent regional parent engagement advisory groups) met on the campus of Maryville Academy in Des Plaines, IL. to begin the work of synthesizing all that had been Discovered and Dreamed in previous stages of the strategic planning process. We utilized World Café to elaborate on three key strategies: (1) Expand- our impact and reach; (2) Evolve-exploring new ideas and programs; and (3) Sustain- building a sustainable future for Be Strong Families. A small group took the output from this meeting and drafted a new strategic plan. That draft was the focus of our All-Staff Professional Development Day in September, was reviewed by our regional parent engagement advisory groups, and vetted by the Organizational Advancement Committee of Be Strong Families' board of directors. Changes were made iteratively, and the new strategic plan emerged.
A new focus suggested by staff and endorsed by the Be Strong Families board of directors is Youth Development. Previously, Be Strong Families has done work with youth in the care of child welfare systems and teen parents, but this work had not been fully integrated programmatically into the mainstream of Be Strong Families. Practically, embracing youth and emerging adults as a primary audience and programmatic focus results in new priorities for 2020 including:
Developing a curriculum on youth leadership development to be deployed initially with regional and statewide Illinois Youth Advisory Boards to the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, and then nationally;
Recruiting partners to develop and co-brand our #WoWTalk deck (Café conversations for youth and young adults).
Promoting parenting as a life skill in health classes and life skills curricula nationwide;
Developing a Parent Café deck and micro-trainings for parents of teens and emerging adults;
Using art to engage youth and young adults in A More Perfect Union activities, including our upcoming public awareness campaign.
As a bonus—a few months into the strategic planning process, midway through Discover and Dream, the BSF mission statement was revised as a result of staff input. The newly revised mission statement emphasizes developing and sustaining conversations that result in transformative change: Be Strong Families partners to create transformative change by developing and sustaining conversations that nurture the spirit of family, promote well-being, and prevent violence.
Reference
Kaplan, Sarah, and Eric D. Beinhocker. "The real value of strategic planning." MIT Sloan Management Review 44, no. 2 (2003): 71.