HFC strategic planning update and employee survey

Dear Colleagues,

The Strategic Planning Team has been working over the past two weeks. We have had some very robust discussions about where the College should focus during the next 2-3 years.

We are charged by the Board of Trustees to complete our work by the end of 2021, and with COVID precautions in place, we are relying on various mechanisms to seek your input. As we get closer to completion of the recommended Strategic Plan, we plan to offer virtual forums for more engaged feedback from the College community.

The Strategic Plan that we are developing will be unlike previous HFC Strategic Plans. We are aiming for it to be more focused than previous plans, offering an overarching direction for the College.

Our initial meetings began with an overarching theme of Student Success. We have been discussing how to define this and how to look at it from multiple perspectives.

Team members have researched other community colleges’ strategic plans and have asked their colleagues for input. We will now narrow the central theme for the strategic plan to 1-3 items to create a refined focus for our new strategic plan. Many of the areas that could be themes will fall into sub-themes, goals, and actions.

We see the strategic plan as a guidepost, a “north star,” that will help guide the College community with intent, action, initiative, and focus. The “theme” or “themes” will be the highest level used for focusing our attention. The sub-theme or goals will be essential pathways to address the main themes. Thus, the themes and the goals will be correlated with each other. The actions will be the means to accomplish the goals and required moves to address the themes.

Once the theme(s) is/are determined, we will be filling in the next steps and seeking your input along the way.

The theme(s) must account for our place as a higher education institution serving our community.

A survey offers us a quick way to see what ideas you see as important and to begin to determine if we need to fill gaps that we have overlooked.

We ask that you take this brief survey by the end of the day on Thursday October 28, so we can begin using your feedback as part of deliberations.

The survey asks you to rate the potential themes from a list that the Strategic Planning Team developed. This does not mean that other items are not important. In fact, in most cases they will fall as sub-themes/goals under a broader theme. There may be ideas for themes that you may believe we should consider as a priority over the list that is provided. If you wish to add to our list, please do so at the end of the survey.

Thank you,
Russ Kavalhuna and Tony Perry