One of the ALHFAM Board’s many efforts during the past year has been to develop a 3-year Strategic Plan.  This Plan was presented at our Annual Business meeting last June in West Virginia and now, through this article, to our membership.   This is important, not only because the Board of Directors want to keep you informed about what is being planned, but because in order for us to succeed and achieve this plan, we will need your involvement and contributions.

The Strategic Plan Summary is a one-page document that identifies a strategy made up of key priorities, or strategy planks, that the Board has chosen to focus on over the next three years.  In our case, these are:  1) skills training, 2) communications, and 3) membership and visibility.  Associated with each of these planks are a number of plans and, in a separate document, the action steps required to make these plans a reality.  As you will see when viewing the document, there are names of those individuals who are responsible for undertaking certain steps, completing each plan, and ultimately, achieving each plank within the strategy.  To make the work more manageable, only those plans identified in “bold” have been selected as the focus during year one of the Strategic Plan.  

As part of our Strategic Plan, you will see that there is also a fourth plank; namely, to revise our organizational structure to match these priorities.  This re-structuring will include a new “Skills Training” Committee, the formation of a “Communications” Committee that recognizes both the increasingly diverse role of our existing Publications Committee as well as the need to address other “communication” priorities, and a re-alignment of resources from what has been our “all-inclusive” SPAM (Services Provided ALHFAM members) Committee to a more focussed Membership and Marketing Committee.

The process which the Board followed in developing this Strategic Plan has already been outlined in issues of the Bulletin (e.g., Winter, 2011, and Spring, 2011).  In response to feedback received sought and shared in various discussions which took place this past spring, the Board revisited and revised substantially the draft Strategic Plan at its meeting in early June.  It is this version that was presented at the Annual Meeting and which is included in this article.  It is important to appreciate that the Plan will always be a working document, subject to the need for further clarification, more refined choices, and able to respond to new information.  Although the Board worked hard to select words that were as clear and meaningful as possible, it was not written as a marketing document, nor would anyone claim the word choices are all perfectly clear.  What is important is that there is a shared understanding about the key priorities, and the important work that needs to be done.  Lastly, it is equally important to understand that the Strategic Plan is not an attempt to present a comprehensive overview of our Association, or to indentify every last job or committee responsibility that the Board needs to undertake over the next three years.  We will still have financial statements and budget to review, elections to hold, fellowships to award, publications to produce, and conferences to support.  What the Strategic Plan does do, however, is it gives the Board a strategy that identifies important key priorities, a means of measuring success, and other important tools to help ALHFAM as a whole move into the future.  The work has only just begun, but your Board is optimistic about what should and can be accomplished as we work together over the next three years.

Bruce Henbest, Past President 

View The Stategic Plan Summary

View Summary Report of Skills Survey