The development of a strategic plan helps build departmental or organizational capacity by helping align its focus and clarifying its vision, mission, and required resources.
Former Chairman of the Yavapai-Apache Nation, and founder of Blue Stone Strategy Group, Jamie Fullmer, guided the project coordinators through developing a framework for a basic strategic plan. Participants were provided with a toolkit, outlining the strategic planning process that was tailored to the needs the Tribes represented in the Working Group.
Several exercises were facilitated during the Workshop that provided opportunities for the Working Group participants to begin developing their respective strategic plans and share those plans with their Public Health colleagues. Each subawardee established a mission, vision, values, goals, and action plans for their program. Each strategic plan establishes a cohesive vision and voice for the future of the program. Responses to the question posed in the workshop “what are you trying to achieve?” in the respective Public Health programs is available in Figure 1.
The workshop concluded with participants reflecting on their experiences during the workshop. As a result of the Strategic Planning Workshop, TECPHI Subawardees are now more prepared to manage their grant and plan their project activities. “This is a very good workshop, sometimes we get so busy, we get exhausted, and make guess steps, this simplifies things and now I can go back with more confidence. This will help with our new coalition members. Normally when you go to workshops you take back materials, but now we can take back an actual plan”.
In addition, having the workshop as part of the Tribal Public Health Working Group creates a feeling of empowerment among the project leads. “It helps to hear everyone else’s comments, what they are working on, and similar struggles”. “This class is above what I expected, the way you made us think about it, write it out, I like the way you made us network with other groups in the process”. The strategic plan and networking relationships built during the workshop will enhance infrastructure and capacity by promoting growth and organizational sustainability.
Figure 1. Responses: What are you trying to achieve?
• Provide services in community and promote wellness
• Have a more integrated approach to health and wellness
• Better collaboration between mental health and the medical field
• Integrating, breaking down silos, looking at relationship and culture in health department
• Looking at building our ability to capture data
• Reduce stray and feral dog animal population
• Solid waste problem
• Focus on environmental health and infectious diseases
• Tie in all program data and evaluation and surveillance systems
• Establish “our own” data system
• Provide health education topics
• Creating a healthy community by focusing on cardiovascular disease
• Getting statistics, we don’t have measures of what we’re doing to know if it is working or affecting the community in a good way
