Our new strategic plan and process

A message from Melanie Goodman, Executive Director

Over the last many years, I’ve helped lots of nonprofits with strategic planning, and so have an enormous appreciation for what’s involved in creating a plan that’s not merely done for planning’s sake - but one that is tracked, adjusted, and evaluated in real time.

So in this moment of extraordinary turbulence and change, to coincide with our 40th birthday, we launched into renewing our own strategic plan.

In December we surveyed people across the youth services sector: practitioners, partners, funders, young people, and more, all of whom had a wide range of experience with Youth Catalytics. We received a gratifying 70+% response rate. We compiled, synthesized, reflected, and ultimately presented all this to a team of 18 selected survey respondents.

In a pair of two-hour Zoom sessions, the team thoughtfully considered our presentations. We discussed where Youth Catalytics is strong, and where we need to get stronger and smarter as all of us in the field reckon with unprecedented uncertainty and disruption, coming at us today from all directions: extreme political polarization, the consequences of the pandemic, and radically changing social and cultural norms, all fueled by increasing technological complexity.

Out of this collaboration came our new 2020-2025 strategic plan, focused and concise - just one page! Immediately out of that came The Foresight Initiative, an urgent, short-term exploration of the youth services sector in the US. Through this project, we will be reaching out to major practitioners, researchers, and young people to identify and synthesize trends, aspirations, and creative leading edges, to produce a better understanding of where we are and where we need to go.

And finally, we hope you like our new website - another outcome of our planning process. Our goal was to simplify and re-organize the site, so that you can easily find what you’re looking for.