New Mission and Vision

After three months of work, the board is ready to communicate the first step with respect to its strategic planning work this year:  NACE's mission and vision statements.

It became clear after a few attempts over the years at re-writing these statements to reflect our current reality, that a board table is a lousy place to draft wording.  A separate committee was needed to delve deep into this work.  This past fall, a group with representation from administration, board, teachers, current and past parents, and even a prospective parent were invited to explore our mission and vision.

A mission statement needs to do a few things:  1) Tell people what you do (and why you do it!)  2) It needs to be simple, memorable, and 3) needs to reflect something about you as an organization, be specific, but not too specific...... 4) It needs to inspire and guide your organization.  In other words, it needs to be everything.  A tall order, for sure!

A vision statement is a bit different.  A vision statement should not state your current reality but projects a future desired state.  What do you want to be in the future?  If we state what we are now already, then the vision may be nice to read but does nothing to spur us forward.

Using data from the past couple of years of research in this community, specifically the 'Why' survey

The committee, over a month, worked through exercises to generate two mission statement and two vision statement proposals for the board to consider and work with.  In November, the board convened it's annual visioning meeting to discuss our past, present, and future, and to review the work of this committee.  After two months of feedback, tweaking, and re-working, the board approved the release of its new vision and mission statements.  Next week, in this space, I will unpack these statements and their story a bit more.

Until then, I'm excited to 'unveil' the NACE board's newly approved Mission and Vision statements:

Mission

Inspiring students to love, learn, and lead together in God's world.

Vision

To be the leaders in education by inspiring a diverse and unified student body to love, learn, and lead with God's grace, bringing Christ's love to the world.