A Strategic Plan to Guide the IECA

Over the course of the last year, a sub-committee of the IECA board has been working on a Strategic Plan. Many thanks to the committee members who volunteered their time to develop the IECA’s first strategic plan: Eric Morgan, Tadesse Sahilu, Leonor Solis, Clive Tesar, Anke Wonneberger, Mark Meisner, and Samantha Senda-Cook. As you’ll read in the plan itself: “By drafting a strategic plan, the leadership of the IECA hoped to codify guiding principles that have been a mainstay of our organization since the beginning. Additionally, we wanted to emphasize some goals as higher priorities. For example, goal three encourages us to increase diversity, which reflects broader global calls for justice. Making these goals explicit not only positions our organization as part of a concerted effort toward doing good in the world, it also offers a road map for the IECA. We treated this as an opportunity for reflection about the first 10 years of our organization as well as a statement about our shared hope for our future.”
The goals of the strategic plan are: 1) create new and strengthen existing connections among practitioners, artists, and academics; 2) enable action geared toward positive environmental policies and changes; and 3) foster diversity and inclusion (specifically in terms of geography, socio-economics, race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexuality, discipline, and career trajectory) within environmental communication. These goals at once build on and expand the IECA’s core identity. For each goal, we developed smaller objectives and actions as well as a timeline for implementation. We also identified Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that are external to our own efforts but that we can use to determine if we’re on track to meet a goal.
Over the summer, many organizations were releasing statements to affirm and support racial justice. We did not release a statement at that time for two reasons: 1) we wanted to demonstrate concrete actions and 2) we did not want to (re)center the places where protests were happening over other places in the world. Since we knew that we had a diversity and inclusion goal in our strategic plan, we wanted to position this plan as part of our response. Furthermore, we wanted to follow-up this plan with actions such as forming a diversity sub-committee to determine the best ways for our organization to identify and meet our objectives under this goal.
Since this is the organization’s first strategic plan, we assume that it is a living document, one that will be revisited and revised as new people lead this organization. As you read the plan, you may feel (as many of us did) that implementing this plan will be a lot of work. Please get in touch if you would like to volunteer for any part of this. We’ll be sending out calls for volunteers in the future, too. We look forward to hearing from you!