Every Tuesday during the month of August, UC ANR leaders will be hosting two-hour online meetings to share their draft 5-year goals and get your input into the ANR Strategic Plan Refresh 2020-2025.

Teams of goal owners will review challenges we face, briefly share accomplishments to date, and present draft strategies for the future. They want to hear what you think may be missing and your ideas on how to shape the future of ANR. There will be breakout groups to provide the opportunity for you to talk with colleagues and submit your ideas to inform the final ANR strategic plan.

See the table below with specific dates for certain topics and draft goals – and sign up!

All UC ANR staff and academics – including campus-based AES faculty and CE specialists – are invited.

Register at http://ucanr.edu/survey/survey.cfm?surveynumber=31683.

Sessions are limited to 1,000 people per the Zoom meeting license. If you have constraints joining by Zoom, please talk to your supervisor and strategize how the local office/REC can help accommodate you.

Date/ Time	Topic			Presenters
Aug. 4 10 a.m. – 12 noon	Increasing Program Resources  ·       Goal 9: Generate Revenue and Optimize Resource Deployment ·       Goal 10: Expand and Diversify Fund Development ·       Goal 11: Improve Efficiency and Strengthen Infrastructure ·       Goal 12: Strengthen Communication and Advocacy			Tu Tran, Associate Vice President - Business Operations Lorna Krkich, Development Services Executive Director Linda Forbes, Strategic Communications Director Anne Megaro, Government and Community Relations Director
Aug. 11 1 p.m. – 3 p.m.	Strengthening Partnerships  ·       Goal 1: Strengthen Research and Extension Partnerships ·       Goal 3: Build Sustainable Economies for Working Landscapes ·       Goal 4: Scale-up the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program			Wendy Powers, Associate Vice President - Programs Glenda Humiston, Vice President Gabe Youtsey, Chief Innovation Officer
Aug. 18 10 a.m. – 12 noon	Fostering a Positive Work Environment  ·       Goal 6: Improve Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion ·       Goal 7: Recruit, Develop and Retain People ·       Goal 8: Support Volunteerism			John Fox, Executive Director Human Resources Missy Gable, UC Master Gardener Statewide Program Director Gemma Miner, Academic Coordinator for Volunteer Engagement Bethanie Brown, Director, Human Resources
Aug. 25 1 p.m. – 3 p.m.	Expanding Virtual Reach  ·       Goal 2: Increase UC ANR's Virtual Reach ·       Goal 5: Modernize Digital Information Delivery System			Mark Bell, Vice Provost of Strategic Initiatives and Statewide Programs Linda Forbes, Director of Strategic Communications

 

 

A stand-alone website devoted to UC ANR's Strategic Plan is now live and can be accessed in various ways:

• Direct link: http://ucanr.edu/sites/anrstaff/2016-2020_Strategic_Plan/
• “Squished” link: http://ucanr.edu/strategicplan
• Mini URL: http://ucanr.edu/p/58630 
• Keyword search of any ANR website for "strategic plan."

The website is designed to give UC ANR academics and staff updated information on the plan and its ongoing implementation, and their role in reaching the plan's goals. It's also a place where stakeholders can offer feedback to leadership. Please let your stakeholders know about the site.

For more information about the Strategic Plan, read AVP Wendy Powers' blog post Updates on implementation of the strategic plan.  

Dear Colleagues,

In August 2016, President Napolitano requested a five-year strategic plan for UC ANR by December 2016. To meet that ambitious deadline, the Senior Leadership Team worked closely with the strategic planning resources at UCOP and UC ANR to guide us through a rigorous process. We enlisted the assistance of representatives of programs and administrative units and drew upon strategic plans that already existed within the statewide programs, strategic initiatives, research and extension centers and budget plans. We also consulted UC ANR advisory groups and committees. When I presented our draft plan to President Napolitano in November, she was clearly pleased with its goals and key strategies for achieving them. The final plan was submitted to the President in late December.

I am now very excited to share the strategic plan with you; it is available at http://ucanr.edu/stratplan1.10.2017. This plan will guide us in a thoughtful and timely manner as we “operationalize” our Strategic Vision 2025. As you read through the strategic plan, please think about how your work aligns with the goals in the plan. I consider this to be a living document that we will modify, add to, and improve upon over time, so your feedback is not only welcome, it's vital.

The five-year plan calls for an estimated $54 million in one-time new costs, including approximately $40 million for capital investments in UC ANR facilities and system infrastructure. To fund the one-time costs, we will finance debt, expand our fundraising capacity and deploy some of our reserves. Ongoing annual costs for the five-year plan are estimated at $6.5 million and will be funded from projected revenue increases of $12 million, which will leave us an estimated annual net operating increase of $5.5 million.

The plan defines 15 goals to enhance UC ANR's research and extension mission, support employees and volunteers, address financial stability and administrative excellence, and increase awareness of UC ANR's value. As you can see on page 30 of the attached plan, each goal has been assigned an “owner,” who will be responsible for overseeing our progress toward its attainment. Our next step is to develop specific action plans with point people, metrics and target dates to reach our goals.

To move the strategic plan from paper to action, I have invited 22 people representing campuses, counties, research and extension centers, administrative units and more to meet at the end of this month. At the two-day meeting, we will begin developing action plans to achieve the 15 goals in the strategic plan. We will also explore how best to engage all UC ANR members in this process because everyone's contribution is critical to the UC ANR mission.

As we map out the paths to our goals, we will be soliciting feedback and engaging different people within UC ANR and external stakeholders. We will keep you apprised of our progress via ANR Update, social media, our website and other reporting. In addition to those regular communications venues, Wendy Powers, associate vice president, will provide informal updates through a new blog she recently launched at http://ucanr.edu/ANRAdventures.

You can offer feedback and collaboration via our many workgroups, advisory committees and public forums, or by sending a comment here.

By identifying and taking specific steps that lead to our goals, we will successfully achieve our Strategic Vision. If you have comments or suggestions for this process, I would love to hear from you. Please submit them to me using this link http://ucanr.edu/5yearplancomments.

Best regards,

Glenda Humiston
Vice President

Editor's note: This is an excerpt from AVP Wendy Power's new blog “ANR Adventures.” For news about the recruitment process for the Vice Provost – Statewide Programs and Strategic Initiatives and Vice Provost – Cooperative Extension positions, read her blog at http://ucanr.edu/blogs/Adventures.

Wednesday (Jan. 18) was the Town Hall meeting to provide an overview of the UC ANR strategic plan and answer any questions. At one point, 177 participants joined the conversation via Zoom and approximately 50 of us were in the UC ANR building in Davis.

VP Glenda Humiston provided overviews of the goal of the strategic plan, the process used to gather input and the resulting goals in the plan. The remaining 45 minutes or so of the hour-long meeting was focused on questions.

Several questions were related to fundraising (plans and strategies to raise funds, intended uses of the funds). Other questions were around communicating progress on reaching the goals set forth in the plan. This is a great question and one that one of the strategic initiative leaders got me thinking about late last week. Somehow we want to be able to share the division's progress on attaining the goals without getting bogged down with details about where we are in the process. Any suggestions? If you have some, I'd love to hear them! One of the Zoom participants suggested a graphic or visual representation – maybe something like the thermometers that organizations use to show status of fundraising targets? Give this some thought and I will give it some more thought, too.

One of the questions was about the program prioritization process (Goal #5). Like pretty much all of the goals, we don't know what the result of this will look like and haven't formulated a plan to go about gathering information and making any decisions needed to reach this goal. This will be a portion of the agenda for a two-day retreat to take place at the end of the month. As the “goal owner” for Goal #5, I have to admit that I was perfectly comfortable early on in the strategic plan development process to leave this as a strategy under another goal. But I understand and “buy in” now to the idea that this is so important to who we are and the value we bring to California that it makes sense to have this as a stand-alone goal. As I said at the town hall, it is a good business practice to review what you do and how you do it. But this is no easy task for such a large organization with so many different programmatic efforts, all of which make a difference in someone's life. And key questions to think about as we undertake the process are what, if any, programming is needed to realize the 2025 Vision and how do those needs align with current efforts? Still a huge task and, as a result, a few of us have met with someone who I think can help all of us work toward answers.

Following development of a draft plan at the retreat, I intend to share the plan with strategic initiative leaders, statewide program and institute directors and county directors, then finalize a process and approach for having these big conversations so that they are inclusive, not overly time-consuming and lead to information that furthers us in our goals. No doubt success will take time and will benefit from the collective brainpower of everyone at UC ANR. I suspect it's one of those things that you get out of it, what you put into it.