A strategic plan is a plan of action that helps an organization to achieve big goals.

Strategic plans usually last for many years.

They tell organizations what to focus on to work towards their long-term goals.

Our strategic plan help us to make decisions about where to focus our resources and time, based on what is important to our members.

What is in our strategic plan?

Our General Assembly approved a new strategic plan in 2022.

The plan tells us how our members want us to work together as a network.

This will be our strategic plan until 2030.

Our new strategic plan has 3 big goals for us to work on:

1. Growing support for our vision for inclusion

We want more people around the world to believe in inclusion.

We explain what inclusion means to our network in our Statement of Unity.

We will work on growing support for inclusion by:

  • Helping new self-advocate leaders to speak up for their rights through Empower Us
  • Supporting families to build a vision for inclusion through Families Taking Action for Inclusion
  • Working with new organizations and partners who share our values

2. Strengthening shared advocacy within the network

Shared advocacy is when our members have the same big goals and work together to push for change.

We will help our members do advocacy together by:

  • Supporting our members to set advocacy goals together
  • Starting conversations within the network about important topics
  • Supporting leaders in our movement to build their advocacy skills

If our members work together to do advocacy, this will mean people with intellectual disabilities will be better included in policies and practice by governments and the United Nations.

3. Expand shared learning opportunities to support the work of our members

We will work on taking the knowledge and experience our members have, and sharing it so that network can learn from each other.

We will do this by:

  • Supporting our members to create learning materials for each other
  • Helping members connect with experts through our projects
  • Bringing our members together (in person and virtually) to discuss and learn together

This will help us make sure that our members are strong and have access to information based on what really works.

You can read our Strategic Plan in English, Spanish, and Arabic.

How do we make our strategic plans?

Our strategic plans are made based on what the members of our network tells us is important.

We collect this information by:

  • Doing surveys to ask members what they want the network to focus on
  • Having webinars where members give feedback
  • Talking to our regions about their big goals
  • Working with our Council to decide what our priorities should be

The feedback that members, regions, and Council gives become our new strategic plan.

Our General Assembly votes on the strategic plan to approve it.