Strategic Planning – The Ecology Center  

Roles: Lead Strategy | Research | Facilitator
Deliverables: Research Report | SWOT Analysis | Strategic Recommendations

Food is often the issue that initiates people's first experience with environmental awareness. Eating and cooking is an easy place for people to begin to think about sustainably. We all eat and we all love farmers!

Knowing food’s importance in people’s lives, The Ecology Center wanted to explore how it could strengthen its food-related programs. As one of the first of many projects I worked on with The Ecology Center, I took the organization through a strategic planning process for their Food Vertical.

As the lead strategist on the project I conducted in-depth research and made strategic recommendations based on my findings. The research ran over two months. It consisted of on-site workshops with advisers and board members and continued with dozens of stakeholder interviews for a SWOT analysis. In addition, I performed a sector analysis of comparable organizations that looked at three lines of inquiry: offering, communication channels, and capacity/reach. The final report synthesized my findings and made recommendations for the short, medium, and long-term timelines to grow the garden education and culinary community programs at The Ecology Center. Many of these recommendations were adopted by The Ecology Center and even turned into projects that I supported in my role at Zago. Below are pages extracted from the final report to show the extent of the sector analysis. Due to the sensitive nature of this deliverable I can not share anything that exposes private information of the client.