By Dana and David Dornsife Dean Gina Lovasi, PhD, MPH

As we work toward refreshing our strategic plan for the Dornsife School of Public Health, I have been looking to our history and to our peers.

Where We Have Been: A Look at Our History to Inform Strategic Planning for Our Future

From looking back to prior strategic planning documents, I understand our upcoming 2025-2030 plan will be the 4th in our school’s history. The prior strategic planning processes were overseen by Dean Emerita Marla Gold who led our school beginning in 2002 and Dean Emerita Ana Diez Roux who led our school beginning in 2014.

Prior strategic planning efforts had identified brevity as an important characteristic of a useful plan. Further, our more recent plan showed a shift toward explicit documentation of what feedback was received and how that affected the final document. This transparency seems aligned with the expressed values which include open and honest dialogue. In that process, and in the interest of keeping the plan itself brief, notes were assembled from the feedback that were at a level of detail better suited to guide implementation. I will bring this history into meetings with the guiding team for our upcoming strategic planning, which will convene for the first time next month.

Finally, in looking forward, we have reached a size where departments, centers, and other groups are themselves giving attention to elements of a strategic plan, such as articulating their own vision. The distributed leadership and strategic thinking we have across our school is amazing to see and learn from. I see no need for a school-wide plan to interrupt or second guess these efforts, though the collaborative process may itself help us align our efforts for greater collective impact. What I do see us using the school-wide strategic plan to achieve is two crucial things:

1. Providing an internally and externally visible articulation of who we are and what we are working toward together as a school.

2. Encapsulating an agreement between the school community and the dean’s office that can guide resource allocation, operational decisions, and annual reporting as we monitor progress toward our goals.

I look forward to inviting our school community to come together, identify and clarify our most important and impactful areas of work, and articulate what it would look like to elevate our mission-aligned activities within each area.

What Other Schools of Public Health Share in Their Strategic Plans

I have been working my way through looking at peer schools with public health accreditation for examples of strategic plans. What I’ve seen so far is a range of dated documents going as far into the future as 2030, but also plans that appear to be undated from what I can see on the website.

Common elements to articulate are vision, mission, and values. I found the condensed articulation of vision in very few words interesting to see, such as University of Arizona Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health’s “Local Impact, National Influence, Global Reach.” One of the missions that was memorable had its own acronym: CARES for the University of Memphis School of Public Health was made up of “Community engagement, Anchor institute, Research-based solutions, Entrepreneurship and innovation, and Student-centric approach.” And I noted that the number of values varied though the included terms often overlapped, and were sometimes further specified to be “core values” or “shared values.”

The articulated areas of planned work took the form of pillars, domains, areas, objectives, or goals, sometimes with corresponding outcome measures. Standing out from the usual labels were the Strategic Compass directions used by West Virginia University School of Public Health, which formed a circle around accountability. And on the subject of accountability, I was impressed by my alma mater University of Washington School of Public Health for their visually appealing and timely progress monitoring, with milestone completion noted to be updated on a quarterly basis.

I was grateful to spend time with peer public health leaders at an ASPPH leadership retreat in Chicago earlier this month. And judging by the upcoming or elapsed end dates I was seeing when scoping out strategic plans, we may have company in undertaking strategic planning this year. I look forward to comparing notes.