Hi Allison,
Thank you for visiting the Community Tool Box (CTB) and Ask an Advisor. To be honest with you Allison, I don’t think the CTB is the right place for answers about issues affecting your corporation, but in the spriit of helpfulness I certainly will provide you with some resources (see below) that might inform your thinking about creating vision and mission statements more generally, the principles apply in multiple situations and under a myriad of conditions so they could prove useful. Before I do that, I think a brief primer is in order to explain a bit about the CTB and Ask an Advisor: the CTB is a free, online resource for those working to build healthier communities and bring about social change, offering thousands of pages of tips and tools for taking action in communities. The vision behind the Community Tool Box is that people — locally and globally — are better prepared to work together to change conditions that affect their lives. Our mission is to promote community health and development by connecting people, ideas, and resources. With the belief that people can change their communities for the better, and informed by disciplines including applied behavior analysis, public health, and community psychology, partners at the University of Kansas and collaborating organizations developed the Community Tool Box as a public service. The CTB is sustained solely through donations at the private, university, and corporate level so as a shameless shill for the CTB your company might consider making a significant and sizable donation to continue our work! The advisor, in this case me, provides links to information in the CTB or from elsewhere if necessary, it is then up to you to sort through and determine the information likely to be the most relevant and helpful. If the advisor thinks her/his own experience might be helpful too then that's added into the mix. The questions the advisor can answer are limited to community work. More specifically, the advisor doesn’t provide advice about personal life situations, and is not able to answer questions involving counseling, mental health issues, individual school or degree programs, computer technology, legal issues, or other questions not related to doing community work, broadly defined. Make sense?
Okay, I promised you links so here are the links to the resources I mentioned above related to developing vision and mission statements. The first link is from Chapter 8 – Developing a Strategic Plan (https://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/structure/strategic-planning), Section 1 - An Overview of Strategic Planning or "VMOSA" (Vision, Mission, Objectives, Strategies, and Action Plans): https://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/structure/strategic-planning/vmosa/main, and the second resource, also from Chapter 8 is Section 2 - Proclaiming Your Dream: Developing Vision and Mission Statements: https://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/structure/strategic-planning/vision-mission-statements/main. I suggest reading the main section and the examples for each, the examples especially are illustrative. The third resource is money, is more hands-on, and will show you exactly how to create a mission and vision for your organization, Toolkit 5 - Developing Strategic and Action Plans: https://ctb.ku.edu/en/developing-strategic-and-action-plans; do read the examples, they’re gold. The last resource is from our Best Change Processes section (https://ctb.ku.edu/en/best-change-processes), 2. Establishing a Vision and Mission: https://ctb.ku.edu/en/best-change-processes/establishing-a-vision-and-mission/overview. There is overlap between most of these resources, but I think you’ll find what you need to write new corporate vision and mission statements. Again, the CTB is oriented toward community work, but the same principles apply.
So, with that Allison, thank you for visiting the CTB and Ask an Advisor, I hope I was able to help you on your way, and please do consider us again if you are ever involved in community work, we hope you will give it all due consideration. On behalf of the CTB, I wish you the very best of success in all your endeavors.
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