Strategic Planning for Centers: Fostering Pervasive, Deep, Integrated, Developmental Community Engagement

Abstract

Strategic planning provides an opportunity to exercise a basic human capacity: to envision a future and strive toward that vision. As Dooris, Kelley, and Trainer (2004) note, planning enables intentionality, allowing individuals to apply an “ability to formulate goals and proceed toward them with direct intent.” Strategic planning is a disciplined effort to produce fundamental decisions and actions that shape and guide what an organization is, what it does, and why it does it (Allison & Kaye, 2011). In higher education, long-range planning—which aligns the institution around its mission, vision, and values as well as articulates goals, logic, strategies, tactics, steps, and necessary resources—is more critical than ever. Most broadly, it allows institutions to clarify mission and purpose, recruit and retain students, attract hire and motivate faculty, plan and maintain facilities, strengthen their programs and student success, and remain financially solvent. Strategic planning witnessed an expansion in higher education through the 1960s, prompted in part by the founding of the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP), but was mainly dedicated to campus physical planning (Dooris et al., 2004). The 1980s saw institutional planning increase, especially following the 1965 and 1972 Higher Education Opportunity Acts, subsequent growth of institutions and enrollment in the 1970s, and rising costs. Publications such as George Keller’s 1983 Academic Strategy heralded the emerging importance of strategic planning.