Strategic Planning Update

Our strategic planning process is well underway. We’d like to extend a huge thank you to all of you who have participated in convenings to gather input for the development of the strategic plan. Your input is paramount to the successful design of our partnership’s mutual work.

In early April our strategic planning retreat team of about 25 worked for two days with facilitators from StriveTogether. The energy, passion, focus, drive, and learning were inspiring as we worked to identify areas of need and possible alignment. Some key takeaways included:

• Strong alignment for the need to focus on building equity, specifically around race and diverse abilities.
• Consistency in the need to focus on eliminating opportunity gaps.
• Excitement about using SMART goals that are time-bound and targeted and inclusive of whole child measures (mental health, social emotional learning, basic needs).
• Building consistent processes to include co-creating with the impacted communities.
• Reinvigorating our commitment to data and communication as integral parts of our work.
• Identifying three defined areas of focus:
  • Birth – age 8
  • Ages 9 – 12
  • Ages 13 – 26

Because our work focuses on systems change and our ability to impact outcomes relies on our partners’ ability to make changes within their own organizations, we developed and sent out a survey to an executive leader from each of our 67 partners. The purpose of the survey is to (1) confirm what we’ve heard during our strategic planning convenings since January of this year and (2) gauge each partner organization’s readiness and commitment to working on possible key factors identified during those convenings. This way we can best support our collaboratives in creating effective campaigns to address opportunities that are essentially pre-approved and supported by the partnership.

We will share results from the survey in June and then develop a draft strategic plan. We plan to share the draft across the partnership early this summer and hope to have a board-approved strategic plan later this summer to roll out at an event in late September. We will then do the structural work required to support the strategic plan beginning in January of 2020. The plan will run for four years from January 2020 to December of 2023.

Thank you again for your commitment and partnership in helping create better outcomes for our East King County youth!

Catching up with a few of the retreat participants.