Strategy + Planning: St. Nicks Alliance
The Challenge
St. Nicks Alliance is a community-based organization with a mission to transform lives through employment, education, affordable housing, and elder care; delivering impactful services with measurable outcomes to children, adults, and the elderly. As a place based organization, St. Nicks Alliance is a civic anchor fulfilling its mission within the context of building a sustainable community for all people through community facilities, arts, environmental advocacy, and community planning. To strengthen overall impact, St. Nicks Alliance sought strategies that address the key factors and barriers to economic and educational opportunity and identified evidence based strategies that lead to transformational work and address poverty. In this process, they recognized the need to foster a staff culture that would be aligned with their transformational strategies.
What We Did
Over the span of 18 months, CRE partnered with St. Nicks Alliance to achieve this goal. We worked with the entire leadership and management team to define what transformational work means for each operating and support team to the department level. To support those strategies, we helped the teams surface the staff practices that are aligned with transformational work – a culture of innovation and high performance in their case. To ground the transformational strategies in their day-to-day work, we worked with department teams to articulate their theory of change including clarifying their target population and sharpening their outcomes and success indicators. A Transformational Work Practice Manual which documents this work will serve as a reference guide for all staff and will be used in St. Nicks Alliance’s onboarding process for new hires.
Impact
After our work with St. Nicks Alliance, the team is positioned to sustain and deepen their transformational work and to manage their performance against outcomes. As part of their management meetings, they will track the impact of their transformational strategies to ensure that the clients they serve are moving towards transformation in their own lives.
“CRE was tremendously helpful in helping us collectively define and develop a transformational culture with outcomes that support our strategies enabling clients improve their livelihood and school success help address poverty in our community.”