Many strategic plans are long on planning and short on implementation--for the most part, they end up gathering dust on a shelf in the CEO's office. MHC's Plan is unusual in the speed and efficiency with which planning has led to change.

Created during a fifteen-month collaborative process that began in 1996 and involved the MHC worldwide community, The Plan for Mount Holyoke 2003 was endorsed by the faculty, approved by the College's board of trustees in May 1997, and published for the community in a thirty-two-page booklet. Today, the document and its contents are so embedded in the College's collective consciousness as to be referred to simply as "the Plan," Mount Holyoke's equivalent of a household word.

The Plan enjoys remarkable visibility on campus and has been embraced by groups ranging from the board of trustees to the first-year class. President Joanne Creighton has been known to bring a copy of the Plan to meetings, a physical reminder to keep its themes at the forefront of conversation and initiatives. And when the class of 2003 was considering designs for its class T-shirt, the students turned to the Plan for inspiration. The resulting bright yellow shirt simply says, We Are the Plan for 2003. "The community's ownership of The Plan for Mount Holyoke 2003 has been a critical element in its success," says Creighton, who fostered collaboration among a wide range of College constituencies--trustees, faculty, staff, alumnae, and students--in creating the Plan.

In fact, bringing the community together to develop "a clearly articulated sense of the central mission, purposes, goals, and aspirations of Mount Holyoke now and for the immediate future" was one of the first-year goals of Creighton's presidency, which began in 1996. Toward this end, she launched a major planning initiative during her second month on the job. "We need to develop a set of goals and priorities that will guide us over the next six years and a set of actions designed to implement them," she said. "They will give shape and substance to our collective aspiration for
Mount Holyoke."

To design the Plan, the president established the College Planning Task Force, which comprised the Educational Priorities Committee (EPC), made up of students, faculty, and administrators, and the senior staff of the College. After over a year of hard work, the task force encapsulated the goals of the College and provided an ambitious blueprint for its future, touching on virtually every area of College life.