Hartford Seminary will host an open session for community comments and input on its Strategic Planning Project from 11 a.m. to 11:45 a.m. on Monday, Nov. 4, at 77 Sherman St., Hartford, CT. The Seminary’s consulting partner for this project, rpk GROUP, will be present to gather feedback from the community. All are welcome and registration is not required. If you would like to contribute but cannot attend the meeting, please send your feedback to planning@hartsem.edu.

Some questions to consider:

What do you think Hartford Seminary does well?

What do you consider the biggest challenges currently facing Hartford Seminary?

What do you see as strategic opportunities facing Hartford Seminary? What would it take to respond to them?

This recent letter from President Joel N. Lohr outlines the Strategic Planning process:

Dear Hartford Seminary Students, Alumni, Friends, and Community Members,

I wanted to take a moment and provide an update on our current Strategic Planning project. While we have been discussing our institutional strategy as a community over the past year, we “officially” launched our project on September 16. Since then, the project steering team, co-led by Professor Deena Grant and Trustee Nancy Roberts, and our project partner rpk GROUP have been collecting data and conducting interviews with faculty, staff, alumni, and trustees. Additionally, the project steering team has been engaged in drafting a shared future vision (SFV) for Hartford Seminary. This SFV is reflective of, but not the same as, our mission statement. As a reminder, Hartford Seminary’s mission is to serve God:

• By preparing leaders, students, scholars and religious institutions to understand and live faithfully in today’s multi-faith and pluralistic world;
• By teaching, research, informing the public and engaging persons in dialogue;
• By affirming the particularities of faith and social context while openly exploring differences and commonalities

Our Nov. 4 Board of Trustees meeting will be an important milestone in the planning process, allowing us to share some early learnings from the data collection and interviews with our Trustees. We’ll also share our thinking about possible strategic focus teams for the project. These strategic focus teams will be formed around strategic opportunities that we believe warrant deeper exploration. They will be led and staffed by Hartford Seminary members, drawing on the experience and expertise of our community. Our goal is to present a final draft of the strategic plan to the Board of Trustees at their March meeting, and to be able to share a final plan with the larger seminary community by April.

Joel N. Lohr, Ph.D.
President