Strategic plan focuses on people, place
By Rob Levin
Prioritizing diversity, equity, and inclusion, centering infrastructure improvements, and boosting College of the Atlantic’s visibility are the three main focus areas of COA 2030, a new strategic plan for the college passed by unanimous vote at All College Meeting during Week 10 of the 2023 fall term.
Passage of the plan capped off a year-long planning effort, begun by COA President Darron Collins in fall 2022 and subsequently led by planning consultant Sarah Strickland beginning in winter 2023. That work included multiple listening sessions, ACMs, workshops, surveys, and a 17-member task force made up of students, staff, board members, and faculty. The Board of Trustees gave their unanimous vote of approval to the plan in their regular winter meeting in January 2024.
“This strategic plan is the result of a lot of deep thinking, collaboration, and hard work by so many members of the COA community,” said COA President Darron Collins '92. “It ably outlines the work that lies in front of the COA community to bring the college into the future while building a stronger, more effective, better organization.”
COA 2030 builds upon the 2015 Strategic Plan (The MAP) and critical work that has been underway since 2020 by planning groups, task forces, and student projects comprising food access and insecurity, housing, human resources, academic priorities, accessibility, and campus services. The plan commits to human ecology as a framework for understanding and shaping the world, celebrates being experimental and collaborative, and illuminates the need for more efficient systems in order to improve the quality of student experience and the school’s impact on Mount Desert Island, the broader world, and higher education.
“The 2030 Strategic Plan requires us to improve student wellbeing and post-graduation readiness, to update our campus systems and infrastructure, and to fortify the financial health of the college and its employees,” the task force states in the introduction. “Simultaneously the 2030 Strategic Plan invites us to stretch outward and upward; to refine our participatory governance; to embody adaptive leadership; and to continue to celebrate our interdisciplinary and human-ecological perspective. We must move forward on all.”
Broken into six main strategic priorities, COA 2030 embraces and seeks to improve current COA structures such as the ACM governance model, boost student wellbeing and post-graduation readiness, improve student retention, enhance the fiscal health of the college, and ensure the continuation of COA’s unique approach to transformational teaching and learning.
COA 2030 highlights include creation of a fund to allow the college to meet 100% of financial need for all students, developing an equity fund to help all students access basic academic and extra-curricular needs, including unpaid internships, and eliminating food insecurity among all students. The plan also calls for the development of off-campus, COA-managed housing for staff and faculty, completion of a feasibility/business plan to offer alternative, year-round, revenue-producing programs, and investment in campus-wide, integrated, secure, coherent IT systems that support teaching, research, on- and off-campus learning, business office functions, and campus-wide communications. Finally, COA 2030 calls for ensuring that the COA campus is physically accessible to all for year-round use.
COA 2030 will form the foundation of the college’s next capital campaign, says dean of institutional advancement Shawn Keeley '00. Preparation for the campaign will take place over the next year as an operational plan comes into being.
“Philanthropy has always been a catalyst to major steps forward for the college, whether new initiatives, buildings and infrastructure, or endowments to support our programs. To accomplish the goals outlined in the strategic plan, we will once again need the support of our community,” Keeley said. “College of the Atlantic has an incredible history of constantly growing, improving, and evolving as an institution, and that is due in large part to the many generous people who have invested in us along the way. I’m really looking forward to working with our supporters, both existing and new, to actualize the many ambitious improvements outlined in the COA 2030 strategic plan.
