Cornerstone Project Moving Forward

The College has made significant progress with the Cornerstone Project, the broad-based planning initiative unveiled in the fall. A preliminary draft of the plan will be available for review toward the end of January, at which point it will also be sent to the Board of Trustees. An announcement will be made to the campus community when the document is posted online. It will be available at http://cornerstones.trincoll.edu (http://cornerstones/ on campus), which is the Web site for all Cornerstone-related information. Hard copies of the plan will be made available to staff members who do not have Internet access.

President Jones and Vice President for Strategic Planning Sharon Herzberger want to remind the College community that the plan is still a work in progress and not a finished product, and they hope that it will spark further discussion among faculty, staff, and students. The Advisory Committee on the Planning Process will be developing methods for gathering feedback and monitoring the planning process. “This is really a key jumping off point in the long-term planning process,” explains Jones. “We’re at a crucial stage. We’ve made some progress and established a framework for strategic planning; now we want to have the entire campus community help us fine tune it. This is about what is best for Trinity College as we look to the future.”

The project is designed to establish a framework for continuous, annual planning in a wide range of areas relative to Trinity’s mission of excellence in liberal arts education. Unlike previous efforts, the Cornerstone Project will be an ongoing planning and implementation process with a new cycle each year. The initiative will develop a strategic framework for the allocation of resources in people, funding, time, and energy. It will provide guidance and priorities for the annual budget process, new initiatives, and fund raising efforts, especially the next capital campaign. The resulting plan and recommendations will not be limited to new initiatives and resources; they will also include possible shifts in personnel, space, and resources and changes in policies and procedures.

There are seven “Cornerstones” of program and resource efforts that are crucial for the mission and future of the College. They are listed below, in alphabetical order.

• Capital Improvements
• Diversity
• Experiential Education
• Global Initiatives
• Information Technology
• Teaching and Research
• Urban Initiatives

In future years, the Cornerstones may change as planning and implementation evolve, but the basic structure of the planning process will continue, albeit with improvements made through a careful and continuous evaluation of the planning process.
 

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