As part of our goals for this year, we are putting together a planning document for 2019-2022 to guide iFRT through this period of change in ALA. We are hopeful that this will put IFRT on a great footing to embrace new challenges while engaging our members in their pursuit and defense of intellectual freedom.
During this process, I'll be posting notes from our meetings to ALA Connect so anyone interested can keep track of the goings on. We will also be polling the membership later in the fall and holding kitchen table conversations at Midwinter to get feedback from beyond the Strategic Planning Task Force.
If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to me directly or to ask on Connect. Thanks!
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Meeting #1 Notes
The IFRT mission is lifted directly from the Bylaws purpose section. Because of this, it's wordy and difficult to remember. Because we want a mission and vision to drive our planning, we will need to develop a new mission and vision as part of this plan.
We discussed potentially hiring a consultant to be used in this process to help facilitate some discussions. There was a general response that a consultant could prove useful, but we would have to explore who to potentially get, what the cost would be, and have the cost approved by the Executive Board.
We wanted to have plenty of member input so that IFRT and this planned direction could reflect what people want IFRT to be, not necessarily what it has been in the past. We want to clear up any confusion as to the power and activities that IFRT undertakes for intellectual freedom as opposed to other allied, similarly-targeted groups (i.e. IFC, OIF, FTRF). We will get this input through a survey that will be developed by Cyndi, Steve, and Eric and kitchen table conversations that will occur at Midwinter headed by the team.
We have a goal of having the plan written and sent to the membership for consideration by March 2019 with approval by the IFRT Board by June 2019.
We talked about meeting monthly, with September to focus on a SWOT analysis and October to focus on editing and finalizing the survey questions.
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John Mack Freeman
Branch Manager
Gwinnett County Public Library
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