Testimonial for Michelle Swallow for her facilitation of the Neighbourhood Houses Tasmania’s strategic planning session with the Board and Staff in June 2018.
Michelle was great! The President and myself as the EO sat down and discussed in pre-meetings with Michelle where we wanted to get to with the strategic plan. We talked about past difficulties with processes and the feeling that previous strategic planning workshops by other facilitators had not helped us prioritise, that we got bogged down in some of the wordsmithing and didn’t feel at the end of the time that we came out with a clear plan.
Well Michelle flipped that on its head and she delivered. She drove a hard process and in four and a bit hours we went from a blank piece of paper to a newly articulated mission and vision that we are all excited about, and clearly articulated strategic priorities under four different goal areas.
Importantly Michelle got the Board and the Staff to do some homework with some pre-thinking so that people came with some work done. We got feedback from members and Michelle helped shape some of that and that prep work really enabled best use of our time.
And it was fun, we laughed a lot and had a good time but at the end of the day we got a draft strategic plan that will take a little bit of wordsmithing but we can pick it up and use it tomorrow, that is pretty uncommon in strategic planning processes.
So thank you Michelle, I would highly recommend her to any community organisation wanting to come up with a meaningful strategic plan, that unites the organisation.