Council of Executives Adopts New Strategic Plan
  

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.