The Strategic Planning Institute (SPI) and Fellows Program is a year-long, cohort-based program that helps rural-serving community colleges build their next strategic plan — through structured facilitation, tools and peer mentoring.

SPI is a partnership between the Belk Center for Community College Leadership and Research at NC State University and the North Carolina Community College System (NCCCS) with funding from Ascendium Education Group — offered at no cost to participating colleges.

Why It Was Created

North Carolina is home to the largest network of rural-serving community colleges in the country — around 50 of the state’s 58 community colleges, more than 80%, serve rural communities and regions.

Rural colleges serve as anchor institutions in their communities, providing more than degrees and credentials, including customized industry training, small business resources, and even local leadership during natural disasters. Community colleges help  communities stay strong and resilient through economic, demographic and technological change.

Because of their essential role, the leaders of these colleges naturally want to build, maintain and successfully execute strategic plans that align with their communities’ emerging needs, leverage their unique strengths, and help them pursue new opportunities effectively — which is exactly what a strategic plan should do.

Strategic Planning Institute (SPI) and the Fellows Program emerged from years of input provided by community college presidents and senior leaders across North Carolina, gathered through dozens of interviews with the Belk Center and the NCCCS. The work began as a multi-year pilot led by Dr. Zach Barricklow, who held a dual appointment with the Belk Center and the NCCCS. Dr. Barricklow provided planning support to 12 colleges using his Five-Phase Strategic Planning Framework and developed a practitioner toolkit.

Now, SPI builds on that pilot and scales it statewide. It’s a program that equips a team of strategic planning leads from each college with dedicated time, tools, facilitation and a flexible planning framework as they refresh or rebuild their strategic plan to reflect where their community and workforce are headed next.

Rural college leaders already know their students and their communities, and have a good sense of where they need to go — what they don’t have is spare time to hunt down the right planning tools, templates and practices on top of everything else on their plates. The SPI exists to close that gap: helping them set aside time to make the most of their planning process, so their expertise translates into a plan they are proud of and can act on.

The Fellows program further scales this work by developing a network of strategic planning practitioners across every region of North Carolina. The Fellows are senior leaders and institutional effectiveness and research professionals with experience leading their institutions through strategic planning who are trained on the Five-Phase Strategic Planning Framework and serve as mentors, coaches, and facilitators assigned to colleges participating in the SPI.

This work aligns with the new NCCCS strategic goals developed by the
System Office, State Board, and Colleges to:
1) build the best workforce in the world;
2) align employers, students and colleges to future-ready our state’s economy; and
3) transform our System to empower colleges and students for continuous success.
By reshaping institutional capacity, policies and culture, this initiative will lay the groundwork for sustained, measurable gains in student outcomes across NCCCS.

How It Works

Strategic Planning Institute

Strategic Planning Institute (SPI) is a year-long, blended training and coaching program for rural-serving community college leaders to develop and implement their institution’s next strategic plan.

Each summer, eight to 12 rural-serving community colleges form a cohort of community colleges embarking on the strategic planning process. Each college has representatives assigned to lead the process – typically one senior leader, one Institutional Effectiveness/Institutional Research leader as well as the president. Each college is assigned one or more Strategic Planning Fellows.

Throughout the year, colleges convene to prepare for (and then execute on their campus) each phase of strategic planning. The phases follow a framework meant to be flexible and adaptable to each institution’s unique context and aspirations:

• Phase 1: Leadership Alignment — Set shared expectations, planning structure and desired outcomes with your team.
• Phase 2: Input Gathering and Analysis — Engage stakeholders, gather labor market and institutional data, and identify your college’s strategic issues and opportunities.
• Phase 3: Strategic Plan Development — Shape goals, determine success measures and strategies grounded in your institution’s mission and your community’s needs.
• Phase 4: Implementation Planning — Assign ownership, build timelines and translate the plan into an actionable roadmap.

Every part of SPI — the workshops, the mentoring the tools — is designed to set each college up to succeed in Phase 5: Rollout, Execution and Tracking, when your team carries the plan forward: communicating it, putting it into motion, adapting it as needed and reporting on progress in the years that follow.

Throughout the process, the SPI draws on NCCCS data infrastructure and subject-matter expertise. NCCCS system dashboards give each college institutional and peer-benchmarking data, labor market reports by service area and K-12 enrollment trends to inform their planning conversations. NCCCS staff also work alongside SPI facilitators to ensure each college’s plan is grounded in the NCCCS’s own strategic direction, so that local priorities and the NCCCS System Strategic Plan reinforce one another.

Along the way, colleges draw on live workshops, one-on-one mentoring and coaching, national frameworks (including from the Aspen Institute and Achieving the Dream), and a curriculum built specifically around the rural North Carolina context — covering community and workforce engagement, data-driven decision-making, and institutional benchmarking, in addition to plan development itself.

Strategic Planning Fellows

Each college in the Strategic Planning Institute (SPI) is assigned one or more Strategic Planning Fellows. The Fellows are senior leaders and institutional effectiveness and research professionals from peer institutions with experience leading their college through strategic planning, who are trained on the Five-Phase Strategic Planning Framework, and serve as mentors, coaches and facilitators assigned to colleges participating in the SPI.

Each year, up to five Fellows are chosen from a pool of nominees submitted. Candidates bring recent, hands-on experience at a North Carolina community college — either in senior leadership tied to institutional strategic initiatives or as an institutional effectiveness/research (IE/IR) professional — along with demonstrated skill in using data for planning and decision-making, facilitating stakeholder engagement, or both. Every Fellow is nominated with a written letter of support from their home college’s president or supervising senior leader.

Fellows co-facilitate SPI workshops and discussions alongside Belk Center staff and national subject-matter experts, and provide one-on-one mentoring to their assigned college’s leadership team as they move through Phases 1-4: aligning leadership around a shared vision, gathering and analyzing stakeholder and labor market data, developing goals and strategies grounded in institutional mission, and building an actionable implementation plan. Throughout, Fellows model evidence-based, student-centered, workforce-aligned planning practices and help build a statewide community of practice grounded in peer learning.

Each Fellow appointment runs one year, aligned with their assigned cohort, beginning with training the summer before SPI’s annual convening. Fellows commit to roughly three days a month from July through July — including in-person convenings and ongoing mentoring of their paired colleges — and receive a $15,000 honorarium covering travel, lodging and their time supporting participating colleges.

As cohort participants complete the SPI program, the strongest practitioners become eligible for nomination as Fellows themselves in future years – thereby leveraging a growing network of strategic planning expertise across rural North Carolina.

Who Should Get Involved

Cohort Colleges

Open to rural-serving North Carolina community colleges, with priority given to institutions whose strategic plans have expired or are nearing expiration. Each participating college identifies its president and up to two co-leads — typically an IE/IR professional and another staff member well-positioned to guide the process.

Fellows

Open to senior leaders or IE/IR professionals from rural colleges with experience in strategic initiatives, data-informed decision-making or facilitation. Fellows commit to roughly three days per month from July through July, receive an honorarium covering travel, lodging and time supporting their assigned peer colleges, and need an endorsement from their college president or supervising senior leader to apply.

Get Involved

Ready to bring your college into the next Strategic Planning Institute (SPI) cohort, or interested in applying to become a Strategic Planning Fellow? Reach out to the Belk Center team to learn more about timelines, eligibility, and how to nominate your institution.

Frequently Asked Questions

The Strategic Planning Institute and Fellows Program is offered in partnership with the North Carolina Community College System, with support from Ascendium Education Group.