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The statements of mission and vision (and in some cases values or principles) provide the overall purpose or result that the planning effort is to achieve. Visions and missions serve as the foundation for all major community development decisions. Because community stakeholders can often agree about what a more ideal community would look like, setting the ‘visioning’ and mission is an important initial step.
A vision statement identifies the specific situations or conditions once the plan has been effectively implemented. A mission is a statement of the organization’s reason for being, often expressed in terms of the customers served, the products produced and the benefits expected. These documents come from historical materials or can be developed as a part of the strategic planning process.
A planning committee can craft a mission statement from existing materials like:
1. Organizational Mandates – The obligations of a corporation, for example a statutory responsibility or a charter, can provide a framework for the mission of the organization
2. Interest Group Ethnography – The planning committee can study of values and preferences of various interest groups in the community and this information can serve as a basis to establish a vision and mission.
Mission-Setting Exercise. Missions can be newly created using group decision-making techniques:
1. Group Consensus – A representative group of participants can work as a team to ‘visualize’ a mission for the organization. The group process should emphasize collective participation and near unanimous approval (or at least tacit agreement) from all participants on final wording for the vision or mission.
2. Create Mission Statement – A facilitator can be employed to work with a group, helping the group answer key mission oriented questions such as which stakeholders does the organization serve; what results are expected; and what values should be used to guide the organization.
3. Scenario Exploration – A planning team can create a set of potential, plausible futures that are then used as a basis for group decisions about a preferred mission for and organization or vision for a community’s future. Here too, the group process should emphasize consensus agreement.
Other ideas ??? send your comments, suggestions, and examples to lced@aces.uiuc.edu
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