Strategic Plan Summary 2025-2029
Category: News
September 10, 2024
To 50 Years and Beyond!
This blog post is authored by Veronda L. Durden, President and CEO of Any Baby Can.
At this time every year, I like to sit and reflect on our accomplishments. We always want to recognize progress, no matter how big or small, and I find it inspiring to see how much we can accomplish as a team. This year has been a little bit different—we’re wrapping up a strategic planning process that will create a roadmap for the next five years at Any Baby Can. At the end of this strategic plan, we will celebrate Any Baby Can's 50th anniversary!
But first, lets reflect on what we accomplished in the last strategic plan that took us from 2019 to today.
Recap of Previous Strategic Plan (2020-2024)
In September 2019, we released our former strategic plan. We had big hopes and dreams. And we all know what happened in March 2020, a global pandemic! Suddenly, things had to pivot in order for us to survive. And pivot we did! Not only did we survive, we thrived. We continued to provide services and meet urgent needs while addressing family health, mental health, child development and parent education.
In 2021, our board and staff recalibrated the strategic plan, given how much the world had changed in a very short amount of time. Over the last few years, we made a lot of progress towards those goals, which included: advancing our thought leadership and innovation, optimizing strategic growth, enhancing organizational culture, improving messaging, and strengthening board engagement.
The results are clear! We've expanded Early Childhood Intervention to serve more kids in more zip codes. We’re now working with moms in Williamson County and beyond through our Nurse-Family Partnership program. We're providing more mental health services to parents through things like expansion in our internship program and enhancing support groups. Our revenue has increased by 27.5% and staff by 18.7% to make our work possible. And there's so much more!
Our Strategic Planning Process
As a nonprofit, we have a responsibility to achieve the greatest impact for families and steward our staff and resources the best we can. Strategic planning is part of that responsibility.
As a large organization (more than 160 staff now!) providing services to so many (3,000+ parents and children!), it’s important for us to stay aligned towards very clear outcomes. The community’s needs are vast and seemingly unending. It would be easy to get discouraged and lost if we tried to do it all.
Our planning started with hiring an external consultant to lead conversations, keep us focused and accountable, and help us extract the most useful information from our data. We conducted surveys, interviewed stakeholders, and gathered input from staff, board members, donors and partners. I’m proud to say that this was the most inclusive strategic planning process I’ve been a part of.
Any Baby Can's New Strategic Plan (2025-2029)
Our strategic plan describes how we will work towards achieving our mission and vision in this five-year period and defines how we measure progress.
This plan calls for us to think about our client services, helping families beyond our services, and how we support our staff. We want to help as many families as we can, and we aim to do that through our services as well as our advocacy work. We will also look at our geographical reach and service delivery models. In addition, this plan lays out a foundation for better supporting our staff and internal operations, as this is the best way to achieve our goals.
Takeaways from our research:
Any Baby Can is a single nonprofit made up of lots of great pieces and people, but it can feel disjointed at times. We aim to clarify and align our work in order to make the greatest impact. We’ve heard a need to define what it means for a family to be successful here in Central Texas. What would it look like if every family had support early on? Any Baby Can is poised to do that.
We want to grow sustainably while not compromising on our standards, which includes the highest quality services for families. 99% of clients say they would recommend us, and 98% of staff say Any Baby Can is a great place to work. We can’t lose that! We can only serve so many families, so extending our impact means working beyond the confines of our organization.
Any Baby Can aspires to be a leading voice in parenting education and early childhood development, providing innovative solutions and setting new standards for excellence. We've set the stage and will continue to facilitate and participate in conversations that matter to the families we serve.
Lastly, we want to excite people! This is good, meaningful work. We can all do something to make our community better, even if things feel hard or overwhelming.
Goals:
By focusing on these goals, Any Baby Can remains committed to creating a brighter future for children and families.
- Impact and Team: At the core of this plan is our intention to amplify our impact. We’ll accomplish this with a robust, well-connected and unified team. Beginning with recruiting, we’ll align our internal practices with client priorities, community priorities, organizational priorities and employee priorities. All with the goal to proactively cultivate and retain the best champions of our mission.
- Internal Systems: We’ll adjust our structure and operations to better serve families and our community for the long-haul. We will navigate updates and changes to technology, roles, responsibilities and systems, finding new resources so that Any Baby Can is here for families for another 50 years and beyond.
- Advocacy and Policy: We’ll recalibrate for a larger scale, addressing systems-level issues that impact our whole community. We want to convert the experiences and knowledge we have from working in the field with families into leadership at the local and state levels. We do this through data and advocacy, promoting better policies and decision-making.
- External Engagement: In order to succeed in our plan, we need public engagement and donor investment. Through a culture of philanthropy and volunteerism, we’ll attract stakeholders who will then fuel our work in support of the vision and goals of this plan.
Read more about our goals and strategies.
There are many strategies, tactics and metrics that will guide this work. Our teams will organize and make progress towards specific targets over the next five years.
As we learned from our last strategic plan, it’s important to be flexible and responsive. This is a work in progress, and a lot will develop and evolve in the first couple years as we identify family success metrics, adjust how our organization is structured, assess current capacity and emerging needs, and so much more.
Next Steps
Our plan is ambitious, and we believe it’s attainable because of the strength we gain by working together toward our shared vision. If you’re interested, I’d love to talk more about what the next five years holds and where we need the most support. You can email me directly.
This plan is bigger than our 160+ employees and 26 board members. We need you to be a part of it. Share your expertise, your resources, your time and your thoughts. Get involved.
You’ll hear more from us throughout the next few months about how the new strategic plan is directing our work. We believe that every child deserves the opportunity to thrive, and we are dedicated to making that vision a reality in Central Texas.
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