Dear Affiliate Colleagues,
I wanted to update you on the Strategic Planning process that the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers has undertaken over the past year. We’ve engaged a number of Affiliates throughout this effort, and I wanted to make the outcomes available to the entire network, as well as invite your feedback.
Late last year, the Alliance Board of Directors formed a Strategic Planning Committee and hired Chatsworth Consulting, experts in strategic planning, to guide the committee throughout the process. The Committee was chaired by long-time board member Ernie Fleishman. The committee also included the Alliance’s Board chairman, Dwight Lee, and five other board members, many with specific expertise in this area. I participated as a member of the committee as well.
Chatsworth gathered volumes of documents and formed a list of people to interview, resulting in interviews with 23 stakeholders. About half of the interviews were with Affiliates, and the rest were with funders, board members, staff members, national partners, and teachers. To those Affiliates who gave their time and attention to this process, thank you for your very helpful insights and candor. Chatsworth and the committee reviewed reports from the interviews, along with background documents, research, environmental information, affiliate surveys, and budgets.
Attached to this email is an executive summary that goes into more detail on the strategic planning process and outcomes.
The analysis confirmed the shared belief of all of our stakeholders that we have a strong program in place with a unique legacy. It also pointed to a need to engage more students and teachers, and a view that reaching underserved and hard-to-reach students is an important part of our programmatic mission. We continuously heard, read about and discussed the need to broaden our reach into geographically underserved areas, and ensure that students at every income level were aware of the awards, knew they were eligible, and were invited to participate.
Ultimately, what emerged from the planning and research was a seemingly simple, yet ultimately multilayered, overarching goal: to provide greater access and equal opportunity for all students to participate in the Awards.
The committee developed specific areas of focus for achieving this vision, with aligned supporting strategies and goals for future growth. These areas of focus are:
– Strengthening and supporting the Affiliate program;
– Increasing visibility;
– Increasing funding; and
– Developing the Board
The outcome of the analysis deeply underscored the importance of the Affiliate network in bringing the program into towns and cities across America. We are committed to a process that brings us together to achieve these goals. We are also working simultaneously to increase the program’s visibility (the traveling exhibition is an example); to increase funding (the AMD Videogame grants, for instance, and our recent grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for the exhibition program); and to develop our board, under the leadership of longtime board chairman Dwight Lee.
Achieving the goals set forth in the plan will require us to identify and eliminate barriers to access for students. The planning process revealed several obstacles to student participation, which limit our ability to reach and positively impact students. These include: inconsistent methods for charging fees to participate; use of quotas to limit the number of submissions; and varied deadlines and judging methods. While there are many consequences of and reasons for these variations, they can result in students and teachers in adjacent counties submitting work with very different timelines and methods of participation, causing confusion.
We are committed to a collaborative process that will unravel factors that limit student participation. We will engage in this process over the next three years, working closely with you and your representatives on the Affiliate Advisory Committee to increase student and teacher participation and enhance the prestige and value of both the regional and national awards. At the end of this period we will assess together our progress and capacity.
Affiliate contracts for the 2013-2014 program year will include an indication of the goals we are working towards. We know the Awards took 90 years to get to this point, so we fully appreciate that gradual change will be necessary and in the best interest of achieving our ambitious goals.
We all believe that the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards program provides enormous benefits to teachers and students and their communities, so it’s incumbent on us to make the opportunity available to more participants and in more areas. We know it can be a life-changing experience for students and incredibly gratifying and motivating to teachers.
With the celebration of the 90th anniversary beginning in Sept. 2012 and culminating at Carnegie Hall on May 31, 2013, and the announcement of the new National Student Poets Program, we have much to celebrate with you, our honored partners and colleagues. Your hard work has made our shared legacy possible.
Please feel free to contact me at vmcenerney@scholastic.com with any questions or feedback. And thanks to those who sent notes after National Events. I look forward to our continued dialogue in the months to come.
My best regards,
Virginia McEnerney
Executive Director, Alliance for Young Artists & Writers
