New PRPS Strategic Plan draft ready for review
The PRPS Board of Directors is drafting a new strategic plan for 2024-2027, and is seeking feedback from the membership on priorities, responsibilities, and timeline. The draft plan may be viewed here.
During the month of October, a member survey is available to collect feedback. An informational Zoom meeting will be conducted by the Board on Wednesday October 18 at 10:00 AM (register here).
The new plan addresses four broad issues that impact the recreation and park industry and its professional practices throughout Pennsylvania, and identifies practical outcomes to contribute solutions over the next four years.
Each issue is further articulated by identifying pertinent PRPS Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Challenges (SWOC). Consulted in this analysis are trends that are particularly relevant to the challenges professional associations will face in the future. The issues are:
1. Public Policy and Advocacy. The purpose of PRPS’s advocacy program is to actively support, defend, promote, and advance community and life-enhancing solutions through Pennsylvania’s park and recreation systems. The audiences and beneficiaries include our elected and appointed officials, our members and their constituents, our partners and collaborators, and the public at large.
2. Sustainable Funding. Ensuring adequate and sustainable funding for public park and recreation systems remains a top priority for Pennsylvania park stewards and recreation providers. Insufficient funding not only prolongs and exacerbates social inequities, environmental harm, and the maintenance of unsafe and poorly maintained facilities, but also hinders economic prospects, innovative solutions, new opportunities, responsive services, and the vocational appeal to new professionals.
3. Collaborative Development. Despite differences of goals, mandates and constraints, PRPS needs the contributions of governments and non-governmental organizations to be most effective in its mission. By empowering our partners’ abilities to share expertise and resources across disciplines and jurisdictions, PRPS can help bring comprehensive solutions to complex public issues, spawn innovation, reduce costs, add value, and improve the quality of life.
4. Stakeholder Engagement. To instill a culture to reach the highest level of engagement among its stakeholders, PRPS must consistently invest in opportunities to merge practical action and service with developing long term, meaningful relationships. To achieve it, our leaders must work to transform people, programs, processes, and technologies. As stakeholder engagement rises, so does PRPS’s organizational vitality. Its most valuable resources are its members and partners, and The Society must empower them as the assets they are.
Augmenting each of the broad issues are a series of specific strategies, each with expected outcomes, with identified priorities, timelines, and the prime groups and committees charged with the action.
All stakeholders are invited to access the draft Strategic Plan, and provide input and comments until October 31. For more information and to ask questions, register for the Board’s interactive Zoom meeting on October 18. Please help shape the next four years of PRPS!