A Community Based Change Initiative

For most organizations, the principal representation of their strategic dimension is their written strategic plan. The plan articulates the organization mission, vision, values, goals, and objectives and the motives behind its decisions and actions. However, written plans should be used as strategic guidelines not as a blueprint that has to be followed. Although there are many ways to construct a strategic plan, to be useful and effective it must answer the following questions:

Andy’s baseline was taken during the first week he was in the Corrective Thinking Program. Andy was given the assessment every week, during his first 4 weeks at the Moving-Back-In center. His score waivered between 39 and 40. Andy’s score indicates a high level of criminal thinking, as a score of 50 is the highest level of criminal thinking one can get using the TCU-CTS assessment tool. Andy began the Thoughtful Change corrective thinking group at the end of week 4. He was then given the TCU-CTS assessment every three weeks and his score was recorded (see chart 1: TCU Criminal Thinking Assessment Scores). Andy was reassessed at the end of each module, which was every three weeks. Andy’s level of criminal thinking steadily declined between 2 and 6 points every three weeks. This can be attributed to the skills and knowledge that he gained through each module and was able to successfully apply into his daily life.

Just imagine for a moment, strolling barefoot through silky sand, the warm sun beating down, and the sound of waves rhythmically rolling in. Picture dolphins dancing in the distance, seagulls whistling their blissful hymn above, and children laughing as they dance through the ocean spray. Sounds like the perfect escape, right? Tragically, the future of such a beautiful scene is in serious jeopardy! The quality of our waters is degrading at an alarming rate; the human race contributes to the problem daily, often without realizing it. Water pollution in Florida is reducing pure water sources at a drastic rate, destroying natural beauty, and severely impacting the survival of local wildlife. Human actions are a major contribution to this issue, therefore citizen awareness is the highest workable solution to diminish the threat and improve the degradation of our waterways. Florida cities near major waterways should establish annual community events to raise awareness and positively impact this problem.

Communication is a very intricate part of a successful strategic plan. Collaboration with the board, executive leaders, management team all the way to front-line staff must be informed what the strategic plan is and how it relates to the mission and vision. The mission, vision, values, goals and objectives of the organization must be organizational-wide dissemination. In order to have an effective and efficient strategic plan one must first select a strategic leader to help decide what their mission and vision will be. “Strategic leadership involves creating a vision and strategy that helps the organization succeed at its mission in both the short and the long term” (Spath, Abraham, 2014).

Bryson, J. M. (2011). Strategic planning for public and nonprofit organizations: A guide to strengthening and sustaining organizational achievement: 4th ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

The book quotes “In creating strategic plans, non-profit leaders are determining which set of strategies are key to the impact they want to achieve in their communities” (Heyman, 2011, pg 63). This specific leadership topic caught my attention because I firmly believe that leaders cannot lead without some sort of a thoroughly thought out plan to do great things. Strategic planning is essential to a nonprofit professional organization in which it undertook a strategic planning process vital arranging procedure to address difficulties, refine its central goal and standards explanation, and acquire input from the individuals so as to better address their issues and go places and advance the association in a durable and intentional way (McHatton, Bradshaw, Gallagher, & Reeves, 2011). At the end of the day, strategic planning is characterized as the key masterminding of a wide term that conceals techniques used to guide decision-making in an association. By obtaining these arrangements of aptitudes, leaders need to consequently consider everything in their association and how does that one arrangement impact the other in the event that they decide to run with arrangement A or arrangement B. With the strategic planning in motion, leaders must develop a language to describe the organization’s current community goals and impact that is essential to effective marketing and

4. CIPD Practical Tool ‘Approaches to Change: Building Capability and Confidence’ (2010) accessed at ht

Have you ever participated in any collective efforts to make progressive change? If so, what were they? If not, why do you think you have not participated in an effort to create change?

Just imagine for a moment, strolling barefoot through silky sand, the warm sun beating down, and the sound of waves rhythmically rolling in. Picture dolphins dancing in the distance, seagulls whistling their blissful hymn above, and children laughing as they dance through the ocean spray. Sounds like the perfect escape, right? Tragically, the future of such a beautiful scene is in serious jeopardy! The quality of our waters is degrading at an alarming rate; the human race contributes to the problem daily, often without realizing it. Water pollution in Florida is reducing pure water sources at a drastic rate, destroying natural beauty, and severely impacting the survival of local wildlife. Human actions are a major contribution to this issue, therefore citizen awareness is the highest workable solution to diminish the threat and improve the degradation of our waterways. Florida cities near major waterways should establish annual community events to raise awareness and positively impact this problem.

Lewin’s change theory involved applied behavioral science, action research and planned change each of which is necessary to examine during the implementation of change programs (Burnes & Cooke, 2012). Lewin’s field theory involves a number of concepts that can be used as a guide to help understand the forces that comprise group dynamics within their life space or environment. Lewin’s framework also explains the totality and complexity of people’s behavior within a social setting that can be modified to bring about successful change.

It is pleasing to know that you currently have direct experience working with social change policy and that you are making a difference within your community. In most major cities, the homeless are often overlooked yet this stigmatized group is vulnerable for many reasons (e.g., health related issues, substance dependence, etc.). Nevertheless, policy allows one to take social and political action against social conditions that impact the lives of clients. Great

For my social change model, I choose the implementation of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) in 1993 for the U.S. Armed Forces by former President Bill Clinton. What this directive accomplished was protection for active homosexuals already serving or wishing to serve in the U.S. Armed Forces. In the simplest terms, this allowed service if you did not tell and you could not legally ask service personnel their sexual orientation. (There is more to DADT than this, my space is limited). (Encyclopedia Britannica, events). This was finally repealed in 2011 by President Barak Obama allowing homosexuals to openly serve.

A traditional model that is used to define a culture of change and in particular the role of vision and leadership is the eight-stage change model developed by John Kotter (1996), which is outlined in Table 2–1. The discussion of leadership, organizational culture, and teamwork presented previously described “what is” the type of culture that is needed to implement successful CQI initiatives; Kotter’s model describes “how to” implement major change and also provides guidance on traditional errors to avoid.

Strategic Planning is the process by which leaders of the particular organization make a choice and decide to set up different strategies that will enable the organization to achieve better performance and continue on the path of success. The framework of the strategic planning can be defined as the social role of the organization, environment, technological and human resource factors all working as one in order to achieve the goals set in place by the organization. In the case of a non-profit organization, like Goodwill industries, where the industry sector is tremendously diverse in terms of the work Goodwill undertakes, the organization still needs a strategic plan. The way that a strategic plan is developed depends on the requirements for strategic planning in non-profit organizations, just as for profit organization, can and always should be designed to bring success, remain profitable, and avoid failure and misuse of much needed resources.

While different organizations appoint several stakeholders for this task, others restrict their strategic planning process to their internal stakeholders only. In this case, only top executives are responsible for the planning and decision-making. However, in the Ritz-Carlton hotel, both internal and external stakeholders are involved in the strategic planning process. The organization understands the benefit of inclusion in generating ideas. This paper will, therefore, elaborate on the Ritz-Carlton hotel as a familiar organization and duly identifies the various stakeholders that ought to be involved in its strategic planning process and the paper examines the importance of these stakeholders and the unique insight they bring to the strategic planning process. Furthermore, the paper considers the various functional areas that are important and the functional areas that are less relevant in the strategic planning process. As in every organization, decision-makers are important so this paper identified key decision-makers in the Ritz-Carlton strategic planning process and finally, we evaluate the importance and effect of these stakeholders in the organization’s planning