JLW Strategic Plan 2027: Building Bridges for Increased Impact and Connectivity 

On March 7, 2022, the JLW Board of Directors approved “Strategic Plan 2027: Building Bridges for Increased Impact and Connectivity.”  The framework for developing the 2022-2027 Strategic Plan consists of three parts:

• Backwards-Looking and Bottoms-Up: This is the standard part of the process that includes reviewing individual feedback from JLW’s annual surveys, a survey of JLW’s Board, a survey of League committee chairs, and other inputs to provide a perspective on what is working and what can or should be changed based on current operations. 
• Topical Strategic Thinking: Over the last five years, JLW has done significant analysis on targeted topic areas such as diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI); the Fund development strategy; and our focus areas. As such, this aspect of the framework aims to integrate our analysis on critical topics that will impact our future operations and goals. As Mitchell was JLW’s president for the 2019-2020 League Year, she had a lot of experience connecting with and sharing insights from other Leagues, so part of this process included benchmarking JLW against other League’s around the country on key topic areas.
• Future-Thinking and the Hypothetical:  When describing this aspect of the framework, Mitchell noted “If we learned one thing from the past five years, it may be that the future is very much unknown!” As such, the third aspect of the strategic planning framework is focused on how JLW can imagine different future directions and environments in order to sustain our impact and relevance for our members as well as our community. As part of this, the Strategic Planning Committee facilitated a scenario planning exercise with the JLW Assistant Council Directors in September 2021 to help imagine many different futures and paths for JLW.