The Center for Community Engagement created a new strategic plan in 2020 with input from the Community Engaged Learning Council on approaches to the planning process. This revised edition identifies Awareness and Understanding of Center, Intentional Stakeholder Engagement, Innovative and Mission-Driven Opportunities, and Internal Operations as the four main areas of focus. Within these, the Center determined specific objectives with projects and key performance indicators that will ensure the success of the focus areas. Throughout the process, CCE staff considered their work with TCNJ faculty, staff, students, and community partners.
The Community Engaged Learning (CEL) Institute and Bonner Institute conducted meetings with their teams throughout the Spring 2020 semester and evaluated the past goals from the previous plan. From May through September 2020, the CCE staff participated in strategic plan meetings and individually completed assignments for feedback as part of the process. The Center’s faculty fellow, Dr. Robert McGreevey engaged in these meetings with guidance as chair of the Community Engaged Learning Council, offering the perspective of faculty. His input was essential to the creation of an effective plan. Staff revisited the Center’s vision, mission, and values and collectively updated them with more appropriate language with the Center’s current goals and aspirations. Using information from the staff meetings in the Spring, the staff next conducted conversations around the goals of the Center. Each staff member completed assignments previous to the meetings to capture individual staff’s thoughts on what the Center should prioritize. The assignments were the basis for each meeting, driving a dynamic conversation and aiding in the deliberations. We agreed upon the four focus areas to concentrate our efforts on to achieve sustainable success.
After determining the focus areas, the Center held a virtual meeting in June 2020 where we presented the original draft of the vision, mission, values, and focus areas to stakeholders, including community partners, faculty, and staff. With their feedback, we then created the objectives, projects, and key performance indicators through a similar approach of meetings and assignments. This procedure ensured the inclusion of both individual opinions and collaborative agreements.
This strategic plan was created with the intention of evaluating it annually to ensure accountability. We decided a flexible approach that adapts for growth throughout the years would be more advantageous than a fixed five year plan. We will revise this plan in the Summer 2021 to update the status of objectives and to create new projects and KPIs as the current ones are completed. We are confident that this will allow for more productivity while avoiding burnout. We are able to be realistic about our capacity throughout the year while still achieving ambitious goals.
Read the CCE strategic plan. It is also accessible on the impact page of the CCE website. We have provided it as a text document with a link in the table of contents to a spreadsheet version of the plan. We hope it provides insight into the work that we are doing at the Center for Community Engagement.
