Strategic Planning for the Next 40 Years

In honor of our 40th anniversary, MMFS is embarking on the development of a Strategic Plan for the next 5 to 7 years. That work got underway in earnest in September when a committee of administrators, faculty members, trustees, parents, and alumni convened for a kick-off meeting. We are fortunate to have Leadership+Design, an independent school strategic planning organization, guiding us through this process.

The goal of the Strategic Planning committee is to spend this year talking, thinking, interviewing, investigating, and dreaming, so that we emerge with a plan for the future: What could MMFS look like in 5 years? What’s possible? What’s practical? What do we need to do today to fulfill our vision of tomorrow? How do we get there from here? We’ve challenged ourselves to suspend certainty and look for new possibilities. Grounded in our mission, values, history, and culture, our mandate is to Dream Big and ask “How might we . . . ?”

At our first meeting, Shu Shu Costa, the group leader from L+D, encouraged the committee to think like anthropologists—uncovering “artifacts” of everyone’s experience at MMFS, and also to use what she termed “design thinking.” So the committee will be excavating traces of the last 40 years of teaching and learning, renovating and building, budgeting and spending—all while using design thinking to imagine what might be.

This will be a year-long process that will involve the whole community. We will be reaching out to many community members to find out what brought them to MMFS, what keeps them here, where they see MMFS in the independent school landscape, and what they wish MMFS could do more (or less) of.

To make sure that this is truly an endeavor for the entire community, we will give everyone a chance to share their thoughts about the future of MMFS. We have three days planned for getting input from community members: a Faculty/Staff Think Tank in October, a Parent Think Tank in November, and a Community Event in January.