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Determining the Mission
Research human services agencies that exist in your community. Discuss a major service gap in your community where there seems to be little or no resources available. Create a mission statement for a new agency that would seek to address this issue in the community. Refer back to text page 23 on how to develop an effective mission statement.
Student Response: Do you agree or disagree with the lack in services reported by your fellow students?
If you agree, please discuss how their mission statement could improve to best meet that community need and what specific services are most needed to serve that population.
If you disagree, please discuss additional resources/information that you found that indicated that their are more or sufficient resources available in our community. If the community need is not due to lack resources, then how can the service delivery system be improved to better use available resources?
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Using the same mission statement you created for the Determining the Mission discussion, let’s expand on that by looking at goal setting.
On page 29, Brody outlines elements of a draft plan:
-Mission
-Vision (3-5 years)
-Goals (3-5 years)
-Internal strengths and weaknesses and external opportunities and threats (SWOT)
-Critical issues
-Actions for each critical issue
-Accountability and timetable for each critical issue
Please expand on the mission statement you have created by also creating a vision of the organization and goals to be accomplished [in three to five years].
When creating a vision, we ask ourselves one of the four fundamental questions (Brody), which is “What business do we want to be in a few years down the road?” You can find other considerations for creating a vision statement on p. 25 as a reference.
When goal setting, please include two goals for the organization for the first three to five years.
For example, if your organization seeks to provide employment assistance, a goal could be to provide better access to services and streamline the referral process by working directly with the Department of Labor (DOL). A measurable way to know if you have met that goal could be to have a formal memorandum of understanding (MOU) in place to coordinate referrals with the DOL and then track the percentage of program participants that were referred by the DOL.
Many organizations also set goals to increase funding to expand services, serve more community members, hire more staff, etc.. If you use the example of seeking funding opportunities, please be specific about how you will seek funding and what additional services and/or staff you were looking to add.
only use textbook-
Brody, R.& Nair, M. (2014). Effectively Managing and Leading Human Service Organizations. Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
