It’s the start of a new year and one that is certain to be pivotal in the history of the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. This year marks the final year of our 2003-2008 USFSP Strategic Plan, an extremely important document that has served us well, guiding us through our inaugural SACS Accreditation process and helping USFSP achieve autonomy within the broader USF System.

It is now time to set our sights on the future.  We have an opportunity as a university community to reflect on our successes, reevaluate our institutional priorities, and develop a focused, strategic plan that will guide us forward for the next five years.   

I, along with the members of the Strategic Planning Steering Committee, seek your input in helping to craft this new document.  To this end we are inviting all USFSP employees to participate in one of two campus-wide discussions on Friday, February 29th, 2008.  To accommodate schedules and to allow for office coverage, we have scheduled two identical sessions, Session 1 (9am to noon) and Session 2 (1pm to 4pm).  These sessions will be guided by an experienced facilitator and designed to solicit your ideas and to identify common emergent themes for planning purposes.

Important work has already been done in preparation of these next phases of strategic planning.  First, in 2005, an extensive review of the 2003-2008 Strategic Plan was completed by nine representative sub-committees, each charged with taking one institutional goal and responding to three specific guiding questions:  Who are we? Where do we want to be? How do we get there?  The final product of this mid-cycle process was the Building on Excellence: A Review of the USF

St. Petersburg Strategic Plan, a document that provides us with valuable data and thoughtful ideas as we move into the next phase of planning.  Second, in the fall of 2007, a two-day pre-planning session was held in an effort to revisit these questions and to begin thinking of a general methodology for the eventual identification of benchmark, peer, and aspirational institutions. We expect that information accumulated from these efforts to also provide critical guiding information for our full-scale planning.

I would like to thank Dr. Frank Biafora for agreeing to chair the strategic planning process and introduce the members of the Strategic Planning Steering Committee

The USF St. Petersburg 2008-2013 Strategic Plan will be your plan.  Therefore it is important that every member of the faculty and staff is offered a chance to have input at multiple stages in the process and for every stakeholder to share in the process.  The forums will be one of several opportunities over the next several months for you to voice your ideas for our collective strategic future. 

Please RSVP by Monday, February 11, 2008 of your preference for one of the two scheduled Town Hall forums.  Please return attached attendance form to Patricia White-Butcher in the College of Arts & Sciences, DAV 100. 

I look forward to seeing you on the 29th and working to plan our future.

Sincerely,

Karen A. White

Regional Chancellor