Henrietta Zalkind, executive director of Down East Partnership for Children, shared her experience of strategic thinking and planning in the following way: “We started out with a vision of where we wanted to go; a vision of how to do better for kids and their families. The planning process helped us think about who we want to be three to five years from now. We came up with four long-term programmatic goals, and everything had to fit under them. We are
developing benchmarks to show progress towards these goals. We want a five-year workplan for years 2000-2005 that integrates program and organizational development [efforts] . . . . Now we all have work plans with short-term objectives, and all of our evaluation work is based on outcomes and links to DEPC’s long term goals. Then we work strategically to build people’s capacity to meet those goals.”