Social Innovation Forum
At the Social Innovation Forum (SIF), we are excited to announce the kick-off of our formal facilitated strategic planning process this month. We’ve selected CFAR (Center for Applied Research) as our planning partner to facilitate a process that will take us through the next eight months.
September marks the first month of the formal planning process. Over the summer we’ve assembled a board/staff working group charged with overseeing the planning process. This fall, we will be inviting members in the SIF community to share their perspectives about the future of SIF.
It took a tremendous amount of work to get us to this point. The past year we’ve been busy with pre-planning as SIF Executive Director, Wyona Lynch-McWhite worked with our board leadership to build an inclusive and thoughtful vision for a strategic planning process that will guide our work in years to come. Our teams worked to update our theory of change, and held a half-day summit last November to identify the strategic questions we hoped to address through the process.
In February 2025 we launched the request for proposals (RFP) and shared it far and wide. We responded to questions via email; we hopped on short calls with firms to answer questions. We received 66 proposals (and read them all!). After several rounds of interviews and reference checks, CFAR (Center For Applied Research) was selected as our planning partner.
This process provided an opportunity to get to know a range of strategic consultants from around the country – both solo practitioners and larger firms. We were so grateful to those who took the time to respond thoughtfully to our RFP. While we could only hire one firm for the strategic plan, we hope that we will have an opportunity to work with others that we met on projects in the future.
We plan to share periodic updates as the planning continues…stay tuned!