Shape Your Strategy

Strategies, unlike goals, include a "how to" recipe for action. Strategies are smart ideas for pursuing your goals in light of the resources you have or can acquire, as well as the barriers and constraints you face. Most community developers—and their supporters, too—need smart strategies at three (3) levels: programs that help advance specific objectives, such as increasing youth employment or providing more affordable housing; capable organizations that perform, self-assess, learn, and adapt over time; and the neighborhood level, where broad changes take place that individual programs and healthy organizations might miss unless there's a "scan" of the wider environment, including the region in which the neighborhood(s) is embedded, from time to time. As the learning guide [PDF] and main knowledge-in-action brief [PDF] in this part emphasize, it's important to know what a strategy is and what it isn't (for example, not a goal or mission statement).

More Resources