2015: STRATEGIC PLAN
Illustrations by Ben Connors.
2015 was the year we decided to produce a new look, fun, accessible and innovative way to describe our plans for the next 3 years – The Strategic Plan! We worked with different groupings of artists, participants, freelancers, staff, associates and trustees to hear everybody’s ideas. We listened to what people were saying and worked with Big 30 interviewee Adele Jeffs and artist/illustrator Ben Connors to produce a Strategic Plan that looked like a newspaper broad sheet.
We found strong visual ways to share our ideas. We shared the Strategic Plan widely and produced something that was jargon free, accessible and owned by everyone at Heart n Soul. We learned that we were again breaking new ground by producing an engaging document that we felt sure would not spend it’s life sitting on a shelf gathering dust! We have shared it in many meetings and used the graphics to express our idea and our plans. There’s a great digital version of it here.
The Strategic Plan was a way of introducing the new ideas that we wanted to test out over the next few years; these included The Chat Up, Heart n Soul Radio, SoundLab and The Heart n Soul Choir. We also used visual diagrams to illustrate the method and the ways that we work and used the Dean Rodney Singers project as an example of a project that had a clear direction and purpose but ended up enabling lots of different relationships and new things that we could never have dreamt of in the beginning.