Reminder: Invitation to share feedback on strategic framing at drop in sessions

This message was shared by Provost Michele Gillespie:

Dear faculty and staff colleagues,

It has been an exciting year of strategic framing work, but we need your advice one more time in order to complete our work capturing our shared aspirations for Wake’s bright future. Please hold Thursday, April 27, 1-3 p.m. on your calendars and read on.

Last fall well over a thousand faculty, staff, students and alumni shared their thoughts about what makes Wake Forest distinctive. The Core Planning Team (CPT) used that input to name our compelling WHY for our strategic framing work: Wake Foresters will embody Pro Humanitate at home and in the world.

The CPT Team subsequently developed a set of key areas to focus our strategic framing work:

• We will be a lifelong learning community that calls all to develop their full potential to contribute in a diverse and complex world.
• We will foster a community of inquiry through research, scholarship, and creative work that transcends boundaries to address the challenges facing humanity and our world.
• We will build meaningful, mutual partnerships to honor our commitment to the wellbeing of our local, regional and global communities.

This spring, five faculty/staff Working Groups, with the support of the CPT and all of you, have been developing big-picture, forward-thinking, university-wide objectives around key topics. The campus provided feedback the week of February 20th, through in-person forums and a series of Zoom sessions, and everyone has been invited to provide feedback at any time using this form.

Thanks to the hard work and leadership of more than 100 faculty and staff on the CPT and the Working Groups, along with your valued feedback, we are well on our way to building our final draft Strategic Framework. Therefore, we invite you to join us on Thursday, April 27, from 1-3 p.m. in one of three locations (Benson 401 B/C; Farrell Hall 104; Wake Downtown Atrium) for a Strategic Framing Drop-In Poster Session. Each Working Group will post its key objectives for Wake Forest’s academic future, and all participants will be given a QR code to share their thoughts.

This is an incredibly busy time for us all as we finish out the academic year. I like to quote T.S. Eliot’s opening line to The Wasteland, “April is the cruelest month…” about now because we are racing to get our seniors graduated, our next first-year class recruited, and all our students supported through the end of classes, even as we reflect on what we had hoped to accomplish last August and haven’t yet completed. That said, I urge you to please make the time to come together to share your perspectives and knowledge. As President Wente recently wrote, the process is a product itself, resulting in meaningful outcomes of its own. Being in community together truly is one of the key reasons Wake Forest is an extraordinary place.