| • New Strategic Plan • Detailed Progress Report [pdf] • GSA Mission & Vision |
GSA's Goals and Objectives
GSA Adopts New Strategic Plan
Judith Totman Parrish, President
If you’re like a lot of people, the very words strategic plan make your eyes glaze over. But hang in here with me for a little bit.
Strategic plans don’t have to be hopeless. A well-written strategic plan can be vital for helping make decisions in resource-limited (read: ALL) environments and can serve as benchmarks for measuring progress.
A few years ago, GSA Council and headquarters staff rewrote GSA’s strategic plan. Mindful that the HQ staff uses the strategic plan explicitly in implementing the vision of Society members through their representatives on Council, we worked to make it a document that points in specific directions and can therefore be used in decision making.
On 8 October 2008, Council adopted a new strategic plan, setting new directions for the Society under seven major goals, including leadership in education & outreach and public policy, and globalization of the Society. Read the new strategic plan.
For the past four years, GSA’s executive director has been charged with reporting progress on the strategic plan to the Executive Committee and Council, and he has done so with a running documentation of each year’s accomplishments. At the recent annual ExCom retreat, when the executive director made his presentation, it occurred to me that we had indeed written a document that was not only useful but that had guided us remarkably well in reassessments and decisions over the past four years.
With the adoption of a new strategic plan, this seems a good time to make the progress report — in all its lengthy detail — available to the membership at large. For each goal and objective, we have a four-year record of progress and successes, as well as a few failures and reassessments, all of which were examined closely in the formulation of the new strategic plan.
The progress report is also posted. I hope that you will take the time to read at least a portion of this document to see that GSA’s HQ staff and Council, along with myriad other individuals and entities that make up the governance structure of the GSA, have been deliberate and successful in carrying out the vision and mission of the Society. I believe this is a large part of the reason that the health of GSA is outstanding and that we are increasingly recognized as a leading geological society in the world.