Wouldn’t it be great if there was a strategic planning process that reinvigorates your team, inserts lots of space for creativity, supports deeper thinking like finding and addressing root causes, and centers the needs and priorities of people and communities?
There is! It’s called community-centered strategic planning. But how is it different from regular strategic planning? Let’s break it down.
Traditional Strategic Planning
Traditional strategic planning usually:
- Asks those in leadership or management roles to set multi year goals and objectives for an organization, often without any input from constituents, other staff, or volunteers
- Asks the organization to execute that plan with the hope that the plan is referred to regularly to see how the goals and objectives are being met
- Rarely becomes a public document for constituents to read
- Shelves the plan, and allows the business to continue to operate as usual, often to the detriment of reaching any goals and disenfranchising staff, volunteers, and constituents in the process
- Often leads to frustration and apathy from leadership and staff for all of the above reasons
Community-Centered Strategic Planning
The community-centered strategic planning process that Prospera Partners uses when assisting clients sets aside those long-held best practices to do things differently. This process:
- Does not use a “top-down” approach
- Includes all voices – leadership, staff, community members, stakeholders, partners, potential partners and any others are welcome and invited to participate
- Uses whole-systems thinking that involves:
- Co-creation – involves staff, leadership, committees, and the great stakeholder holder community in meetings, planning, discussions, facilitated sessions as necessary to set goals, learn about challenges and successes, understand the needs of the stakeholders and the organization
- The “I, We, It” Framework: The “I” is me doing this work, who am I, why do I do this work? The “We” is us doing this work together in the organization. And “It” is the work to be done to achieve the mission.
- Transformational Leadership: a leadership approach that drives change in individuals in order to create social systems change and evolve followers into leaders, giving people more of a voice
- Includes a transparent process from start to finish that allows greater community participation with feedback loops, input opportunities
- Revisits the plan regularly, and considers it a living document
- Requires the org to have a fundamental willingness to challenge the relations of power that are implicit in these common top-down practices
The hands-on – and participatory – approach we use allows everyone to have a voice in co-creating the entire strategic planning process to maximize commitment and buy-in from all.
It is also important to understand that the whole-systems thinking process is an emergent process where the group may uncover things that require reassessment or pivoting in a different direction; new ideas will emerge from within the group for how to move forward, new content ideas will arise, technical assistance needs will change as the group makes decisions. An evolving and emergent process requires several methods for evaluation: harvesting information, gathering data, and evaluating the needs of the group, and its impact on the group of practitioners.
Ready for a Real Life Example?
We have been lucky to work with numerous nonprofit organizations on their community-centered strategic planning including Girls Inc. of Santa Fe. We worked with their 18-person strategic planning committee, and hosted a series of community convenings where they trusted us to create a space where everyone could bring their full selves into the conversation. The process began with input directly from the youth they serve in their various programs, and continued with multiple sessions with stakeholders and partners. The result? They discovered a need to center the youth in the conversation going forward. This means they’ll reexamine programs with a new and fresh perspective, and find new ways to ask their constituents for input and feedback as they expand and grow.
Investing in a community centered strategic planning process with your organization and community can bring important and big results. The process does not happen overnight – we thoughtfully plan for a minimum of 6 months of time together – but the return on investing in your organization’s resources into this process can be very impactful.
