I don’t know about you, but I have loved “back to school” for as long as I can remember.   There is nothing I looked forward to more than picking out new school supplies…the notebooks, unsharpened pencils, and most especially the 64 Crayola crayons. Looking at those 64 new crayons always made my heart beat a little faster, knowing that I could color the worlds I saw, and imagined, making beauty from a blank piece of paper.
 
I’m thinking about that feeling as I contemplate the new fiscal year that starts October 1st. It’s our “back to school” time and we’ve been hard at work trying to create beauty from a blank piece of paper, otherwise known as our annual work plan. I can imagine that thinking of an annual work plan as a thing of beauty might be a stretch but come along with me while I try to explain.
 
Every year, at this time, we try to get down on paper all that we hope to achieve in 12 months time. We start with where we want to be on September 30th of the coming year, so this year we began with the question, “Where do we want to be by September 30, 2011?” And followed up with questions like, “What will we have created?” and “What difference will we have made?” Then we looked at where we were…a hard, factual, data informed scan of current reality. Once we had a shared understanding of where we stood, we began to explore, “What would have to be true for us have the impact we desire, given where we are starting from today?” From those conversations came our annual objectives, strategies and benchmarks. 
 
Those objectives, strategies and benchmarks make manifest our concrete plans, most ardent hopes, and in some cases, just plain wishes, for the next year…in service to young children and their families. It’s the in service part that makes our plan a thing of beauty for me. 
 
Behind the black and white of the text on paper lies a brilliantly colored, 64 crayoned, shared vision and mission in service to young children and their families. Without that our plan, or any plan for that matter, would be as the cynics say, “just words on a piece of paper.”
 
Over the coming weeks I will be discussing the specifics of our work plan and the impact we plan to have in 2011. I look forward to your comments.