Blueprint guides efforts to strengthen service to members
Published: July 9, 2012
The eight critical issue areas of CSBA’s Policy Platform have long guided the association’s work, providing a broad policy framework for implementing CSBA’s mission to set the agenda for the public schools and students of California. As such, it guides the association’s policy and political leadership activities.
Those critical issue areas are now complemented at both strategic and operational levels with the adoption of eight priority areas encompassed in the Organizational Blueprint adopted last September. The Blueprint is a systematic realignment and recalibration of CSBA’s operations and delivery of services under Executive Director Vernon M. Billy’s guiding principle of forward thinking and strategic positioning.
“It’s already logging successes in sharpening CSBA’s focus and enhancing its member services,” according to Angelo Williams, Ed.D., CSBA’s assistant executive director for Policy and Programs, who’s overseeing the Blueprint’s implementation. Those first-year wins include the reorganization of CSBA into a flatter, leaner organization that is focused on the membership. This is reflected in the creation of a new Member Services Department, which is solely devoted to meeting the information and training needs of members, and the newly formed Policy and Programs Department that serves as the backbone for the association’s policy work.
As foundational as those changes were, “those were the low-hanging fruit,” Williams said. “They gave the association the leaner, more focused organization it needed to better deliver the education advocacy required at the state and national levels and the training, information and professional development that governance teams need at the local level.”
The Blueprint’s eight priorities are primarily internal—reorganization for greater efficiency and innovation, and better use of information and communications technology, for example—but the ultimate payoffs are external: better member service, enhanced policy and political influence, and governance training for the 21st century.
“It’s not just the technical hardware and software, it’s the process,” Williams emphasized. “We regard this as a focused way of using all of our resources to build membership value.”
More information about the Blueprint and the overall strategic direction of CSBA is available in the interview with Executive Director Billy that was published in the Fall 2011 California Schools magazine: http://bit.ly/KW7NoA.