Welty’s Strategic Plan Listening Session

On Thursday, Sept. 23, we invited local community leaders and friends to attend an in-person Listening Session. We wanted to collect input on the strategic plan the board put together in January, 2020, just before the world shut down due to the pandemic. Our staff and Board are very proud of the plan, because we feel it offers a doable road map for Welty to meet its goals. During the process, we also realized that we needed to update our mission statement, so it better reflected what we think Welty’s role should be in the Stateline region. The purpose of the Session was to review these goals with partners and supporters, who have their own special perspective on the needs of the community.

Welty’s new strategic plan and mission statement.

We are very grateful for those who spent their valuable time…

Instead of roundtable discussions, we decided we wanted a more playful atmosphere. We created four different stations, one for each of the plan’s strategic goals. At each station was a different “game”, to inspire participant’s creativity as they considered how Welty could meet its goals. One game included two dice, representing a length of time and an amount of money and, based on the roll, the player would suggest an action for Welty to realize in 5 years with $40,000 (for example). In another game, players drew 5 cards with individual words, discarded 2, and then made a connection between the remaining 3; examples of some words are: wildlife, students, interactive, science, climate, comfortable).

…giving our strategic plan some thought!

The Listening Session committee is still sifting through responses, including a digital version that was sent to folks who were unable to attend (let me know if you’d like to contribute with a digital version). A few takeaways: many participants made suggestions similar to the individual strategies we’d already identified as important to achieve; participants are almost unanimous that we continue to focus on K-12 students for the bulk of our programming; they enjoyed the informal atmosphere and the conversations it inspired. 

Now our Board needs to start working on metrics for these individual strategies and a time frame to meet them. It’s wonderful to start planning for fully in-person activities again and really dig into realizing our long term goals. We are very grateful for the folks who spent their valuable time giving this all some thought and we look forward to implementing many of the suggestions

Brenda Plakans
Executive Director, WEC
info@weltycenter.org
608-361-1377