We love working with clients and their program stakeholders to articulate theories of change and put strong plans into action to make those theories real. We can work with you to design a strategic planning approach that makes the most use of your organization’s time and other resources and that is centered on your mission, vision, and values. As part of this process, we will provide you with simple, practical documentation to put your plan to work, and we can even support your managers in aligning their team-member work plans with the resulting strategic plan.
“The team at Cities & People Advisors were wonderful to work with during a recent one-year engagement with our placed-based grantees. They were highly skilled, flexible, reliable, and showed a true commitment to operationalizing equity throughout the project. Their ability to building trusting, clear relationships with our partners, and convey feedback was invaluable. I personally learned a lot from their approach, and it was a pleasure to work with them!”
Throughout 2023, C&P facilitated the five-year strategic visioning and planning process of the California Work & Family Coalition, a coalition that focuses on paid family leave, sick days, and safety days for workers throughout California. The 2024-2029 strategic plan, viewable here, was made public in April 2024. Through interviews, a membership survey, and listening sessions, we produced an environmental scan that highlighted emergent issues, trends, specific community needs for highly impacted populations, funder strategies, and more. The themes that emerged from our data gathering phase included a desire to continue prioritizing Paid Family Leave (PFL), focusing on racial equity in the Coalition and its policy work, increasing language access for Coalition membership and in its education work, increasing access to benefit utilization for all communities, expanding paid sick days, and shifting narratives in order to lift up the dignity of caregiving work. These learnings, and many more, are incorporated into the strategic priorities shared in this plan, guiding the areas of focus for this coalition through 2029.
The process was highly participatory with various feedback loops for coalition members and deep partnership with the Strategic Planning Committee and coalition staff. We held Committee retreats, led co-design processes at the annual statewide membership meeting, and helped the Coalition create its first ever Theory of Change.
Cities & People partnered with First 5 Alameda County from Feb. 2023-Feb. 2024 to guide their four Neighborhoods Ready for School Initiative grantees through a comprehensive four-year, cohort-based work planning process for their place-based kindergarten readiness objectives. We supported the four grantees in prioritizing the needs of home childcare workers, who are primarily women of color, as a strategy to support the local economy, provide more childcare to communities in high need of childcare slots, to uplift BIPOC people through entrepreneurship and wealth-building, and to increase kindergarten readiness of children in Alameda County, an important milestone to achieve for long-term academic success. Here you will find links to each grantee’s work plans, released in January 2024. These work plans are being used as a tool to leverage more funding for each organization’s place-based vision for their neighborhoods with both governmental and philanthropic funders. They were all presented to the First 5 Alameda County Commission in February 2024.
Cities & People began working with the Environmental Health Coalition (EHC) in San Diego in early 2024. We kicked off the project with the facilitation of a fully bilingual strategic visioning retreat to review the organization’s vision and big picture objectives with the entire staff. We then worked closely with each of EHC’s organizational teams to identify their optimal annual goals and strategies and to take action to increase focus on their goals and outcomes by reducing mission creep and addressing burnout. We also provided executive coaching for the Executive Director to support the implementation of decisions made through this process as well as providing our team coaching services to the Administration/Human Resources Team to support them in increasing effectiveness through stronger communication, collaboration, and trust-building. Here you can view the deck we used for the staff retreat in March. The project culminated with the organization making key decisions around its overall priorities and with each team refocusing on its most critical goals.
We have also recently led annual team work planning retreats for:
ACLU California Action’s Racial & Economic Justice, Education Equity, and the Gender, Sexuality, and Reproductive Justice Teams
The National Association for Certified Professional Midwives
