***THIS SESSION IS OPEN TO ALL ATTENDEES***

***This session has been moved to The Longmont Museum & Cultural Center (Kaiser Classroom C) across the parking lot from the Longmont Rec Center.***

BOARDS WITH BRAINS is SVP’s board governance education series (learn more, below). Join us for our 2015 trainings, like this one: Strategic planning charts a path from your organization's vision to reality by connecting mid-term goals to the real time activities that can help you achieve them. Make sure your organization gets the most from the planning process by readying staff and board, understanding the purpose, benefits and pitfalls of the planning process, and inspiring others to action through a flexible, responsive and measurable plan.

About this Session:

Strategic planning can be an invigorating, multidimensional process for setting a course of action and accomplishment for the next three years of your organization’s efforts. Many planning processes fall short due to lack of investment and understanding about the purpose and process by stakeholders, lack of engagement of critical voices, and under-preparedness by organizational leadership. Once a plan is in place, many organizations struggle to keep the document alive as a flexible road map to be implemented on a daily basis—making achievement of goals spelled out in the process elusive. This interactive session offers practical advice, tools and examples to define and clarify the importance of planning, and sets you up for both effective planning and implementation over time. Session objectives include:

• Get grounded and ready your board and staff for strategic planning
• Make the most of the strategic planning process to engage stakeholders, gain clarity and strengthen relationships
• Keep your plan responsive and on track through tried and true implementation techniques

About our Presenter:

Kara Penn, MBA, MPP is a Founder and Principal Consultant for Mission Spark, a management consultancy that partners with philanthropic, nonprofit and social enterprise leaders to achieve transformational results and to strengthen the social sector. Kara graduated from The Colorado College, where she was a Boettcher Scholar. She completed her MPP at the University of Chicago, and her MBA at MIT Sloan School of Management. She has been the recipient of three national fellowships (Watson, Coro and Forte), recognizing her leadership and community contributions. In 2014, she co-authored Fail Better, Design Smart Mistakes and Succeed Sooner (Harvard Business Review Press).

About the BOARDS WITH BRAINS series:

SVP Boulder County is invested in strengthening our shared community's social sector. We want to help make our nonprofits and the people who run them wildly successful, and, we believe strong leaders – both staff and board – help create capable organizations.

With that in mind, we've designed our BOARDS WITH BRAINS professional development series. We've got recurring sessions covering governance fundamentals (a nice refresher, or first-timer introduction), as well as sessions digging into leadership topics (deep-dives into specific areas of governance best practice).

And, to make it easy for as many Boulder County leaders to sign up, sessions are priced accessibly. Our per-session fee is a below-market $30, and each session includes a limited number of scholarship slots. Additionally, we offer a transferable, 8-punch passes (resulting in a 20% discount, just $24/session!).

We do hope you’ll join us – sign up now, and, if you need assistance purchasing a series punch pass, or details on scholarships, get in touch by emailing Olga now.