Creating a Stronger Future, 2025

This fall we officially launched our new strategic plan, Creating a Stronger Future, 2025 Our plan is bold and transformative and focuses on our community and our relationships—with our students, with each other, and with our external partners. As we create our future, we are doing this together.

The Saint Paul College community recently embarked on a yearlong collaborative process to create its updated strategic plan, “Creating a Stronger Future 2025.” During this collaboration, internal and external stakeholders provided invaluable input about what has made the college successful for over one hundred years, and what we can do better to meet the ever-changing demands in today’s unique time and setting. While the plan was developed in the spring of 2022, it is really the result of several years of conversation about what is important to us.

We began at the very foundation of who we are as a college, by revising our  mission, vision, and values .  This was a critical step as these statements guide our strategies and communicate the purpose of our College to others. We then applied an equity lens through a collaborative process including internal and external stakeholders in both formal planning sessions and informal conversations to identify our strategic directions. With equity practices infused throughout the entire plan, it also aligns with the Minnesota State 2030 equity goals.

C reating a Stronger Future, 2025,  is a three year plan which will allow us to be nimble and flexible in addressing perpetual uncertainty and accelerating change. Grounded in equity, the plan aligns with our anti-racism, and trauma-informed commitment and provides four strategic directions to take the College to 2025 and beyond.

As we think about our strategic plan and what we want to accomplish, we’ve identified the essence of action for each direction.  Each of the directions can be concisely described with these four verbs: develop, cultivate, strengthen, and build.

Everyone who attended the launch, participated in an exercise to consider how their work was interconnected to the strategic plan. Staff and faculty chose which strategic direction they wanted to join.

Each of the four groups discussed the following questions:

• How do you see yourself and your office/department/organizational unit fitting within the Strategic Direction?
• If your strategic direction could speak, what would be a self-definition?
• What is the relationship of your chosen strategic direction with the other strategic directions?
• In order to achieve your work as it aligns with the strategic directions, your needs include the following:

A spokesperson from each strategic direction group then  shared the key highlights  of their discussion.

This image illustrates all of the "hopes" written on the wooden planes.:

Our strategic plan is bold and transformative.  It provides our blueprints for the next three years, yet it is flexible enough for us to respond to any unforeseen circumstances or significant changes.

The planning process was a dynamic experience in helping us identify what is really important to us and where we should focus our time, talent, and resources for the next three years. Our college is creating a stronger future for our students, our staff and faculty, and our community--a future in which we care about the success of everyone.