Facilitating a Stakeholder-Driven 5-Year Strategic Plan
THE CLIENT CONTEXT
College Success Foundation (CSF) works to increase educational equity by supporting low-income students, students of color, and first-generation college students across Washington State and Washington, D.C. Through mentorship, college and career readiness, and postsecondary persistence programs, CSF partners with schools, districts, and communities to expand access to higher education.
After years of growth, a significant loss of public funding pushed CSF toward a more centralized model with reduced capacity and resources. CSF had been close to completing a five-year plan, but the new reality called for a strategy built for the world its students and schools are actually living in. Leadership saw this as an opportunity to realign and strengthen the organization for its next chapter, not a setback.
THE OPPORTUNITY
CSF engaged The Group Forward to facilitate a comprehensive strategic planning process at a genuinely pivotal moment. The challenge was to build a plan that was both ambitious and grounded, one that could navigate a funding shift and real regional complexity across Washington and D.C. while staying honest to the realities of the people doing the work. Educational attainment has become a dividing line for lifelong opportunity, even as schools are stretched thin and asked to do more with less. This was not a moment for incremental thinking. It called for a strategy that could focus CSF's impact and secure its long-term sustainability within the challenging modern-day landscape.
How we moved College Success Foundation (CSF) Forward:
Overall Approach:
The Group Forward designed and facilitated a three-phase process from October 2025 through June 2026 that carried CSF from discovery to a board-approved strategic plan and implementation framework.
But the work was about more than producing a plan. Throughout the process, TGF modeled the kind of collaboration CSF wanted to carry forward: inclusive, candid, compassionate, and grounded in genuine listening. We created spaces where staff could safely engage in honest and sometimes difficult conversations, challenge long-held assumptions, navigate real differences, and still stay connected to one another. Humor, empathy, and thoughtful facilitation helped make those conversations possible.
As a result, the process did not simply produce new strategic choices. It gave CSF new practices and experiences of how to work through complexity together, strengthening the organization’s capacity for collaboration well beyond the planning process itself.
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1. Discover and Engage
We began with deep stakeholder research, engaging more than 150 individuals across teams, regions, and levels through surveys, focus groups, and interviews. By creating psychologically safe spaces for candid feedback, we surfaced bright spots, tensions, and unvarnished insights while establishing a foundation of trust and honest dialogue.
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2. Align through stakeholder visioning
During an in-person, all-staff WAVE workshop, we used humor, empathy, and structured dialogue to help staff engage honestly with one another and challenge legacy assumptions without becoming stuck in defensiveness. Participants practiced listening across differences as they determined what to keep, what to adapt, and what to leave behind, ultimately aligning around five strategic shifts.
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3. Co-design across roles and perspectives
Programmatic working groups brought frontline staff and leaders together to wrestle with real choices and trade-offs. Rather than simply gathering input, our facilitation helped participants practice shared ownership, surface disagreement productively, and build on one another’s thinking. Several members began drafting work plans before the formal handoff, signaling that implementation was already taking root.
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4. Decide with clarity
We established transparent decision-making protocols that allowed frontline perspectives to meaningfully shape leadership decisions while maintaining clear executive accountability. Just as importantly, the process modeled how CSF could continue making difficult choices with greater transparency, trust, and inclusion.
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5. Prepare to execute and collaborate differently
We facilitated a board session focused on co-authorship rather than passive review and developed an implementation framework with clear sequencing, milestones, and progress monitoring. Together, these practices gave CSF not only a roadmap for execution, but stronger ways of working across teams as the strategy moves forward.
The Result
By the end of the engagement, CSF had a board-approved five-year strategic plan, an implementation framework to guide the work, and an organization with genuine ownership over its direction. At the final all-staff preview before board approval, nearly all staff confirmed they were ready to move forward with no unresolved concerns.
Just as importantly, the process left behind more than a strategy. Staff and leaders had practiced new ways of working together: listening across differences, surfacing tensions without avoiding them, challenging assumptions, making decisions transparently, and staying connected through difficult conversations. Those collaborative practices became part of the foundation CSF can draw on as it implements the plan and navigates the challenges ahead.
In Their Words
"The Group Forward helped us stop trying to be everything everywhere and begin with a new way of working where it matters most. The shift from a typical annual approach to a living strategy changed how our entire team thinks about the work. That's a rare outcome from a planning process." - Michael Cheever, President & CEO
“I’ve worked with a lot of consultants, and I haven’t seen the level of authenticity, care, and staff inclusion that TGF brought. They engaged teams in ways that elevated their thinking about how we do our work, and strengthened collaboration across the org. They helped us build a strong, clear plan that integrates direct service with broader systems change, and they did it in a way that really aligned our teams around where we’re headed and how we’ll operationalize the work. The Group Forward’s empathy, creativity, honesty, and optimism helped transform what could have been a rote planning process into a genuinely collaborative, forward-looking visioning activity. The resulting five-year strategic plan—centered around student success and sustainability—has re-energized our organization. To accomplish that at such a difficult time in our evolution was truly remarkable.” Danette Knudson, Vice President, Program Strategy
“As someone working on a strategic plan in this capacity for the first time, I was initially nervous. One of our goals was to involve the entire organization in this process - staff, board, and partners in the community. We wanted to create a plan that everyone felt ownership of, and for the process to be one that would bond us together for the hard work that lies ahead. TGF led with an inclusive lens, helped us set clear success metrics, and actually made the process fun." Madeline Mulloy - Director of Philanthropy
“I’ve been at CSF long enough to have ‘done strategic planning’ before, but this process with TGF was fundamentally different. The sheer amount of feedback and input they helped us gather across levels of staff and stakeholders was a huge undertaking, and it meant that, for the majority of our goals, we truly accomplished what we set out to do. My hope now is that we keep building on the inclusive practices we learned from them.” Rebecca Swartz, Senior Executive Administrator
“There was a moment in this process where I realized, ‘Oh, I see it.’ I finally saw a cohesive, connected strategic plan that I could truly understand. For the first time at CSF, I feel a real energy behind the work—we’re still overwhelmed, but now we know what’s broken, where we need to focus, and what we’re working toward. TGF helped us get to a plan that feels smooth, coherent, and full of potential.” Sarah Porter, Director of Accounting & Finance
"I was really excited when we entered into this strategic plan to bite off something big — and I think you got us there. We're going to do a lot more than be a cute little nonprofit; our efforts are going to be bigger and broader. Washington State won't know this was the pivotal moment when we helped more kids get into college and changed the long-term trajectory of those families. But this is that moment. This is when it turns." Sarah Porter, Director of Accounting & Finance
