Developing a Strategy to Solve Portland's Homelessness Crisis

Opportunity

Portland's largest homeless charity, which provides housing, health, and employment services to over 12,000 adults and families impacted by homelessness, poverty, and addictions every year, needed to develop its new strategy and vision for the next 3 - 10 years.
Based on feedback from prior strategy development initiatives, the organization wanted to broaden the stakeholders it engaged and aligned in the development of this strategy to include not just the Board and Executive Leadership Team but also approximately 250 other stakeholders including operations team leaders and staff members.

Solution

Pepper Foster was engaged to facilitate the visioning and strategy development phases. Taking the outputs from the client's own current state assessment, Pepper Foster conducted a series of fourteen workshops with 77 operations team members, 37 operations leaders, 9 executive team leaders, and 17 board members. The workshops reviewed the current state, gathered additional input, brainstormed future state visions, generated and prioritized goals, developed and rationalized strategic priorities and pillars, and aligned all stakeholders around a common mission, vision, strategy, and goals. Following the workshops, the new strategy, vision, and goals were summarized, documented and communicated in a single and easy to consume 11 x 17 strategy articulation map deliverable.

Outcome

All stakeholders were engaged and aligned around the new strategy, vision and goals. New mission & vision statements, a new equity commitment, a clarified focus, a new strategy, a new 10-year goal, three new strategic pillars, and a host of key 3-year strategic goals were developed, communicated and supported. The client was able to move forward into detailed strategic planning and execution.