Section 2. Proclaiming Your Dream: Developing Vision and Mission Statements

Creating your organization's vision and mission statements are the first two steps in the VMOSA action planning process. Developing clear vision and mission statements can provide an important foundation for community initiatives. These statements explain your group's aspirations and purpose in a concise manner, help your organization focus on what is most important, and provide a basis for developing other aspects of your strategic plan. This section provides a guide for developing and using your organization's vision and mission statements.

What is a vision statement?

Your vision describes the conditions your organization and community hope to create in the future. It is an aspirational picture of how things could look if the issue important to you were addressed as fully as possible. It might describe a world without war, a community where everyone has access to safe housing, or a community in which people are treated equitably and with dignity.

Your organization's vision may be expressed through one or more vision statements, which are brief phrases or sentences that communicate hopes for the future. By developing a vision statement or statements, your organization can clarify its aspirations and guiding principles for members of the organization and for the broader community.

There are certain characteristics that many effective vision statements have in common. In general, vision statements should be:

• Understood and shared by the people involved in the effort
• Broad enough to include a variety of community perspectives
• Inspiring and meaningful to the people involved in your effort
• Easy to communicate -- brief, memorable, and clear enough that people can readily explain it to others

Here are some examples of vision statements that illustrate these characteristics:

• A community where all individuals and families achieve their human potential.
• ValorUS envisions a world free from violence where the dignity of every person is valued and respected.
• A future free from lifelong nicotine addiction. (Truth Initiative)
• A world without Alzheimer's and all other dementia. (Alzheimer's Association)
• The United States is a humane community in which all animals are treated with respect and kindness. (ASPCA)
• A world where everyone has a decent place to live. (Habitat for Humanity)

What is a mission statement?

The next step of the action planning process is to ground your vision in practical terms. This is where developing a mission statement comes in. An organization's mission statement describes what the group is going to do and why it is going to do it. An example is "Promoting care and caring at the end of life through coalitions and advocacy."

Mission statements are similar to vision statements in that they also look at the big picture. However, they are more concrete and action-oriented. Your vision statement describes the future you hope to help create; your mission statement describes your organization's overall purpose and contribution toward that future.

The mission statement might refer to a problem, such as inadequate access to safe, affordable housing, or a goal, such as providing equitable access to health care. While mission statements don't go into a great deal of detail, they may begin to indicate broadly how your organization intends to address the issues or goals it has identified. Some general guiding principles are that mission statements are:

• Concise. While not necessarily as short as vision statements, mission statements should communicate their main point clearly and efficiently.
• Outcome-oriented. Mission statements explain the fundamental outcomes your organization is working to achieve.
• Inclusive. While mission statements describe your group's key purpose, they should usually be broad enough to allow different strategies, partners, and sectors of the community to contribute to the work.

The following examples should help you understand what we mean by effective mission statements.

• Promoting community health and development by connecting people, ideas and resources. (Community Tool Box)
• ValorUS works to prevent and end sexual violence by advancing equity and eradicating oppression.
• The Alzheimer's Association leads the way to end Alzheimer's and all other dementia by accelerating global research, driving risk reduction and early detection, and maximizing quality care and support.
• The mission of the ASPCA, as stated by Henry Bergh in 1866, is "to provide effective means for the prevention of cruelty to animals throughout the United States."
• Seeking to put God's love into action, Habitat for Humanity brings people together to build homes, communities and hope.

Why should you create vision and mission statements?

Why is it useful for your organization to develop vision and mission statements like those above? First, these statements can help your organization remain focused on what is most important. Even when an organization has a clear sense of purpose, day-to-day responsibilities, new opportunities, emergencies, and competing priorities can make it easy to lose sight of the larger goal. Vision and mission statements provide a continuing point of reference.

Second, your vision and mission statements give other individuals and organizations a concise view of what your group is and what it hopes to accomplish. When the statements are easy to find -- for example, on your website, organizational materials, presentations, reports, or other communications -- potential participants, partners, funders, and community members can quickly understand whether your work connects with their interests or responsibilities.

Finally, vision and mission statements can help focus participants on a shared purpose. The process of developing the statements can be as important as the final wording. When people have meaningful opportunities to contribute, discuss differences, and understand how the statements were developed, the process can strengthen shared understanding, commitment, and ownership.

Having a clear and compelling vision statement has other advantages, such as:

• Drawing people to common work
• Giving people a clear picture of the better future the effort hopes to help create
• Inspiring community members to take positive and effective action toward shared aspirations
• Providing a basis for developing other aspects of your action planning process: your mission, objectives, strategies, and action plans

Having a clear and compelling mission statement also has advantages, such as:

• Translating the broad aspirations of your vision into more specific, action-oriented terms
• Explaining your organization's purpose to community members, partners, potential participants, and others in a clear and concise manner
• Helping funders and partners understand your organization's purpose, intended outcomes, and alignment with potential funding or collaboration

How do you create vision and mission statements?

With a better understanding of vision and mission statements, your organization can begin developing its own. If your group already has vision and mission statements, you may wish to review them in light of the criteria discussed above. If participants believe the current statements could be improved, the same process can be used to revise them. Let's begin.

Learn what is important to people in your community

Because developing your vision and mission statements is an early step in creating your action plan, it is especially important that these statements be grounded in community priorities, strengths, experiences, and values. Understanding what matters to the community can help your organization develop a vision and mission that remain relevant over time.

One of the first steps you should take when developing the vision and mission of your organization is to learn which issues, strengths, aspirations, and concerns matter to people in your community. How do you go about doing so?

There are many different ways you can gather this information, including:

Conducting public forums or listening sessions with community members to gather ideas, experiences, priorities, and hopes for how they would like to see the community change.

In public forums or listening sessions, people gather to discuss what is important to them. Facilitators can help create opportunities for people to describe community strengths, concerns, priorities, and aspirations. Document what participants say through notes, summaries, or recordings when participants have agreed to recording, and explain how the information will be used in later planning.

Holding focus groups with people who have different relationships to the issue, including people most affected, community leaders, service providers, businesses, faith communities, educators, advocates, and others whose experiences are relevant.

Focus groups are smaller guided discussions that allow participants to explore a particular issue in more depth. In some circumstances, organizing a group around a shared experience, role, language, or community connection may help people speak openly. In other cases, a mix of perspectives may be more useful. Design the groups according to the questions you are trying to answer rather than assuming that people of the same age, ethnicity, profession, or other characteristic necessarily share the same views.

Your organization may hold several focus groups to understand different perspectives on the issue. For example, if your organization is involved in child health, you might speak separately or together with health care providers, parents and caregivers, young people, teachers, community health workers, or other groups. Once you have a draft vision or mission statement, you might hold additional discussions to learn how people interpret it and what they believe is missing.

Conducting interviews with people who bring different forms of knowledge and experience. These might include people directly affected by the issue, neighborhood and community leaders, organizers, elected officials, school administrators, health professionals, faith leaders, business and labor representatives, and staff from public or nonprofit organizations.

Different people will bring different kinds of knowledge. Some may have research, administrative data, professional experience, or knowledge of policies and systems. Others may have lived experience, community history, or practical knowledge about barriers and strengths that institutions have overlooked. These perspectives can inform planning, funding proposals, advocacy, implementation, and evaluation.

These methods are not mutually exclusive, but there is no requirement to use every method in every planning process. Choose the combination that fits your purpose, resources, accessibility needs, timeline, and community. What matters most is that the process provides meaningful ways to hear from people who are directly affected as well as people with other relevant knowledge, responsibilities, or perspectives.

Decide what to ask

Whether you are talking to one person or a large group, your purpose is the same: to learn what matters in your community and what people hope the effort will accomplish. Here's a list of questions you might use to focus your discussions with community members. These questions may be used for individual interviews, focus groups, public forums, surveys, workshops, or other ways of gathering information.

• What is your vision for our community?
• What would you like to see change?
• What kind of community, program, policy, school, neighborhood, or other setting do we want to create?
• What do you see as the community's major issues or challenges?
• What do you see as the community's major strengths and assets?
• What do you think should be the purpose of this organization or effort?
• Why do these issues matter?
• What would success look like?
• Whose perspectives or experiences are missing from this conversation?
• What barriers could keep people from benefiting from or participating in this effort?

When your organization is gathering ideas for a vision, encourage participants to think broadly and aspirationally. This is the stage for imagining what a better future could look like rather than immediately rejecting ideas because they seem difficult. Practical choices, tradeoffs, and resource constraints can be addressed as the planning process continues.

Decide on the general focus of your organization

Once your organization has listened to community perspectives, it is time to decide the general focus of the organization or initiative. What issue or opportunity is most important to the work? For example, will you focus on housing, public health, racism, economic opportunity, education, environmental conditions, or another community priority?

A second question is the level at which your organization will work. Will your effort begin in one school, one neighborhood, or one city? Will it work across a region, state, nation, or several countries? The appropriate scope will depend on the issue, the people affected, your organization's mission, available resources, and where meaningful change can occur.

These questions rarely have simple answers. Use what you learned from community engagement, relevant evidence, organizational responsibilities, and practical constraints to determine the best direction. Open the discussion to the people who will carry out and be affected by the work so that different perspectives can inform the decision.

Funding may also affect the scope of an initiative. If your organization accepts a grant to address child hunger, for example, the funded work will necessarily be connected to that purpose. Be transparent about requirements that have already been established by funders or other authorities and identify which decisions remain open to community influence. Within those boundaries, community perspectives should meaningfully shape how the work is understood, designed, and carried out.

Develop your vision and mission statements

Now that your organization has a clearer understanding of what the group will do and why, you are in a strong position to develop statements that capture those ideas.

As you consider possible statements, keep them broad and enduring enough to remain useful over time. Vision and mission statements that are appropriately wide in scope can provide continuity with a community's history, values, and long-term aspirations while still guiding current decisions.

Vision Statements

Remind participants that an organization may use one vision statement or several complementary statements to capture its aspirations. The goal is not to find a clever "perfect" phrase, but to communicate clearly the future the effort hopes to help create. Encourage participants to suggest possibilities and make the ideas visible to the group, whether on poster paper, a whiteboard, shared document, or another accessible format.

As you do this, remind the group of:

• What you have learned from discussions with community members
• What your organization has decided will be its general focus
• What you learned about effective vision statements at the beginning of this section

If you have a hard time getting started, you might wish to review some of the vision statements in this section's Examples and ask how well they reflect the principles discussed above.

After brainstorming a list of possibilities, your group can discuss the ideas critically. Sometimes one statement will quickly seem to capture what people have been trying to express. At other times, the group will need to combine, revise, or compare several ideas.

If the choice is more complicated, ask yourselves:

• Does it help bring people together around meaningful work?
• Does it communicate a hopeful and credible picture of the future?
• Can people affected by the issue see their aspirations and dignity reflected in it?
• Does it provide a useful foundation for the other parts of your action planning process?

Don't become overly concerned with having a particular number of vision statements. Whether your organization ultimately uses one statement or several, what matters is that they provide a clear and coherent picture of the future your organization and community hope to help create.

Mission Statements

The process of writing your mission statement is similar to developing your vision statement or statements. Brainstorm several possibilities, discuss them, and revise them until the group has a statement that communicates the organization's purpose clearly. Unlike a set of complementary vision statements, an organization will usually benefit from having a single primary mission statement.

Ask:

• Does it describe what your organization will do and why it will do it?
• Is it concise and easy to understand?
• Is it outcome-oriented?
• Is it broad enough to include the goals, communities, partners, and strategies that may reasonably become part of the work?
• Is it consistent with what you learned from people affected by and involved in the issue?

Together, your organization can decide which statement best meets these criteria and reflects the purpose of the work.

Seek broad agreement on your vision and mission statements

Once members of your organization have developed draft vision and mission statements, it may be useful to learn what other community members think before adopting or using them widely.

You can return to people and groups who participated earlier or invite additional perspectives. Ask whether the statements are clear, respectful, inclusive, accurate, and consistent with what people said mattered to them. Also ask what seems to be missing or unclear.

For example, an adolescent pregnancy prevention initiative that wants young men to participate more fully might consider a statement such as "Young men in Asheville have the information and support they need to make healthy decisions." Community feedback could help determine whether the statement communicates the intended goal clearly, whether it unintentionally excludes or diminishes anyone else, and whether another wording would better reflect the initiative's broader vision.

You will also want to know whether community members believe the statements capture the overall spirit of the aspirations and purpose they discussed. Your organization may discover that something important was omitted or that different groups interpret the same wording in different ways.

Broad agreement is useful, but unanimity may not always be possible. If meaningful disagreements remain, understand and document them rather than forcing consensus simply to finish the process. The final statements should reflect a thoughtful and transparent process and should not imply a level of community agreement that does not actually exist.

Decide how you will use your vision and mission statements

Developing the statements is an important step, but their value comes from how they guide and communicate your work. Use them when making strategic decisions, evaluating new opportunities, explaining the organization to others, orienting new staff or volunteers, and deciding whether activities remain aligned with your purpose.

There are many ways your organization may choose to communicate its vision and mission statements. For example, you might:

• Include them in organizational letterhead, stationery, or other formal materials when useful
• Use them on your website and relevant digital profiles
• Include them in presentations, orientation materials, newsletters, social media, or other communications
• Include them in media materials or background information for journalists
• Refer to them when giving interviews or speaking publicly about the organization
• Include them in annual reports, strategic plans, grant proposals, partnership materials, and other organizational documents
• Use them when considering whether a new program, partnership, funding opportunity, or policy direction fits your organization's purpose

Review the statements periodically. An enduring vision and mission should not change every time a new project begins, but major changes in the community, the organization, or the issue may eventually make revision appropriate.

In Summary

Developing effective vision and mission statements is an important part of strategic planning because these statements influence many of the decisions that follow. A strong vision describes the future your organization and community hope to help create, while a strong mission explains the organization's purpose and contribution toward that future.

The most useful statements are grounded in meaningful community input, clear about the organization's purpose, broad enough to guide work over time, and concise enough to communicate easily. The process should make room for multiple perspectives and genuine disagreement rather than treating consensus as something that must be forced.

Think broadly and aspirationally, listen carefully to the people affected by the work, and then translate those aspirations into statements that can guide practical action.