At the beginning of a new year, many people set resolutions or goals for what they want to accomplish in the upcoming year. At CANI, we set resolutions every three years for where we would like to be – these resolutions are called our Strategic Plan.
Last Thursday night CANI’s board approved our Strategic Plan,
which will guide our efforts at eliminating poverty through 2015. One of my favorite things about working
here is that we have a philosophy that we’ll accomplish a lot more if we are
ambitious and come up short, versus being conservative and accomplishing
everything. And as usual, we have adopted a very ambitious strategic plan.
We have six long-range goals:
1.
The first, in a nutshell, is to develop an integrated system of services
that can meet any needs for any family we see. This goal includes providing
a host of programs that we have traditionally provided as well as developing
programs that are needed in the community but not provided by anyone else. For
instance, a major objective for the next three years is to develop new
homelessness prevention programs, as well as expand services to Veterans.
2.
The second goal is to increase the provision of services that build assets for families and
individuals. In truth, most of our programs are aimed at building assets, but
this goal might be considered to mean more direct, higher impact asset-building
activities like increasing access to capital by expanding our lending programs.
3.
Our third goal is all about community development, because we know that we must work on the conditions
that low-income people live in as well as their own individual issues. In
addition to housing development and system-building, we will expand our
advocacy efforts, expand our AmeriCorps program to better support other
organizations, provide capacity-building assistance to other organizations, and
be available to step up as a convener of community collaborations.
4.
We also recognize that to provide great service,
we must be a great organization. We
have a detailed plan to do just that - our Blueprint to Greatness.
This plan includes a significant number of initiatives modeled after Jim
Collins’ “Good to Great”. We will enhance our board and staff, continue to
ensure excellent accountability and transparency, and increase our technology,
to name a few examples.
5.
The fifth goal relates to increasing our public awareness and increasing our
flexible financial resources. Increasing awareness of poverty is a key
strategy for us, as this leads to better understanding across the community of
issues low-income families face, which in turn leads to better advocacy,
greater support for CANI and our partners, and even more people helping their
neighbors. We also want to increase our fundraising efforts, expand our Energy
Saver Consultants business, and expand our fee-for-service activities.
6.
Our last goal basically relates to most of the
others to one degree or another. We need to
increase the focus on our service area outside of Fort Wayne. CANI’s
service area includes twelve counties in northeast Indiana. The majority of the
low-income families in this area live in Fort Wayne, but there are thousands of
low-income people that live outside of Fort Wayne.
I am always excited after we complete one strategic
plan and develop a new one. This is the fourth strategic plan I have worked on
at CANI, and as I look back I can see
the truly impressive impact of our process. We have never accomplished all
that we set out to do, but we have always accomplished many great things in our
plans. This plan will be no different, and we've already gotten started!
For much more detail, check out the plan for yourself at http://www.canihelp.org/WhoWeAre/Documents/strategic_plan.pdf
