Our Strategic Framework

Students First

Vision into Action: Turning our boldest dreams into reality

Berea College is using a dynamic, flexible strategic planning process to capture both our great work underway and our hopes for an even better Berea. Titled “Vision into Action,” this new form of strategic planning is focused on ensuring that our ideas are translated into real results as quickly and effectively as possible.

“Vision into Action” is a testament to the high-quality feedback received during President Nixon’s Listening Tour and Town Hall sessions—an open, honest, collaborative sharing of ideas and insights, hopes and dreams, questions and concerns. These ideas generated actionable strategies that enhance the student experience, foster academic excellence, and strengthen our campus community. We are excited to share our bold Vision for the future and the Actions that will bring that Vision to life.

Vision

Berea will use our current strengths to create the “next horizon” of higher education. Berea is and will be:

Berea’s bold vision for the future features new forms of thinking, working, and creating community. Berea is ready to claim:

Action

Students First

The Student Experience in our Beloved Community

Berea aspires to offer an environment of possibility and promise, where students can further develop the gifts they bring to us, access resources to grow, explore knowledge to expand horizons, and be empowered to shape the complex world ahead.

- Emphasize the importance of belonging, meaning, and mattering, through actions as well as words
- Improve counseling, health, and support services
- Launch new trainings (acting on Campus Climate Survey results)
- Create outdoor connections and joy campus

- Connect academic, labor, and co-curricular experiences
- Create collaborative, efficient student success teams of advisors and mentors
- Emphasize academic excellence achieved through the liberal arts, including Berea-unique forms of active, applied, and aspirational learning
- Foster understanding of Berea opportunities via student communication tools and practices

- Define and launch Berea’s Pinnacle Experience–our unique four-year student journey
- Leverage Berea’s campus sites (ex: farm, forest) and partnerships
- Encourage engagement with centers, clubs, ensembles, athletics, and more
- Design “immersive” summer or semester experiences

Berea Balance

Serving Self, Campus, and “One Blood, All Peoples”

Berea aspires to create a culture of radical love: our community welcomes all into an integrated ecosystem that connects the impartial love of all peoples to the love of place, self, and service.

- Employ effective mediation of internal conflicts (such as through an ombuds structure)
- Encourage opportunities that promote faculty/staff/student connection and coalition-building
- Nurture a culture of shared governance, accountability, and impartial love
- Promote career growth and leadership opportunities that facilitate a culture of impartial love

- Create a culture that respects work/life balance, values being “alive in work,” and includes time for thought, reflection, joy, and fulfillment
- Reduce silo-ing and busy-ness across campus by creating more intentional time for collaboration
- Enact workplace equity, such as through holistic auditing of job descriptions
- Increase operational awareness relating to time, planning, execution, assessment processes

- Continue to engage deeply with Appalachian communities
- Value and strengthen our alumni networks
- Coordinate efforts to maximize student engagement with regional communities
- Elevate community voice and ensure collaborative planning with community partners

Financial Freedom

Resources & Infrastructure for Choice, Opportunity, and Stability

Berea aspires to create new models of freedom, mobility, and stability: Berea will steward its human, environmental, technological, and financial resources to provide a stable and secure foundation for Berea’s next visionary chapter.

- Invent next phase of Berea’s unique student financial aid/support model
- Determine current enrollment goals and admissions strategy
- Improve faculty/staff compensation
- Maintain careful stewardship of endowment
- Center philanthropy on meaningful donor and alumni relationships

- Develop new campus Master Plan for our natural/built environment
- Ensure cutting-edge and back-up Information Technology structures
- Update and expand ecological sustainability efforts, recognizing climate change pressures
- Integrate Continuous Improvement initiatives across campus

Our Great Commitments

Our Eight Great Commitments inspire and are interwoven into this framework and future action items

Berea aspires to continually uphold and advance the inspirational ideals of our Great Commitments: we strive to build a culture of possibility and hope, strengthening our resolve to bring our values and principles to address the most pressing challenges of our time.

Strategic Framework: Materials

Campus materials relating to the Strategic Framework are available in this password protected folder.

Read Strategic Framework Materials

Strategic Framework: Ideas and Input

Submit via form below or via email at president@berea.edu