At its quarterly meeting
on August 15, 2013, the Council of Executives of All Kids Alliance adopted a strategic plan that
refreshes its Mission and Vision for the organization and projects the
Alliance’s development over the next few years.
The Council declared
that the Mission of the Alliance is:
To ensure a prosperous
Greater Houston by building capacity for
communities to improve the lives of young people,
from cradle to career.
The Council’s Vision for
“what success will look like” is expressed this way:
Young people enter
adulthood as life-long learners, prepared to succeed in life and their chosen
career with:
·
employable skills
·
healthy habits
·
a strong
social/emotional foundation
·
a sense of civic
responsibility
Our communities thrive
because:
·
a quality education
system produces a skilled workforce
·
businesses find the
talent they need to grow
·
better jobs create
upward mobility for families
·
prosperity improves the
general quality of life and place
·
collective impact is
achieved
In addition, the Council
reaffirmed the “Core Principles” that guide the Alliance’s work. These are our standards of operation.
We engage all sectors of the community: business, non-profit, faith-based, educators, others.
We pay attention to children's development across the span of years, from cradle to career.
We build continuous improvement into our practice, focusing on scalability and sustainability.
We are accountable to the communities we support, and we maintain close contact with them.
Five objectives guide
the action plan for the next few years.
The objectives describe what must be done to realize the Vision. With support from the Council of Executives, Alliance
staff are expected to
·
establish a total of 15-18
Regional Partnerships across eight counties in Greater Houston,
·
create a robust Data
Management System,
·
recruit a corps of
facilitators to guide Continuous Improvement in the “Collaborative Action
Networks” generated by our Regional Partnership,
·
establish a stable base
of funding for the Alliance, and
·
develop a system to
communicate successes and share best practices among our Regional Partnerships.
Consistent with our core
principle to “make decisions informed by reliable data,” the Council endorsed
two sets of metrics to track our objectives and action plan, one set for students and
the other for All Kids Alliance as an organization.
The plan concludes with
a five-year forecast of activity. The
forecast is based on the potential for 16 Regional Partnerships. It projects benchmarks of progress for those
partnerships and generates a personnel count and budget requirements for the
Alliance to meet its mission of “building capacity for communities to improve
the lives of young people, from cradle to career.”
All Kids Alliance and the Strive
Network
As the strategic plan projects
the Alliance forward, language and progress benchmarks in the plan are tightly
aligned with the terminology and assessment system of the Strive Network.
The
building blocks of the Strive approach are represented in the Strive Framework. The Framework’s “four
pillars” have been further expanded into a comprehensive
developmental/assessment system (still in draft form) known as the Strive Theory of Action.