Building the next strategic plan for Pratt
Pratt’s 2019 strategic plan has served as a guide and foundation for the Institute’s work and initiatives for the past five years.
Over the course the 2024-25 academic year, Pratt Institute will engage in a thoughtful, consultative, and collaborative process to develop our next strategic plan. During the process, all members of our campus community will have multiple opportunities to share their aspirations and ideas about the future of Pratt.
Pratt has engaged Windemere Consultants to guide the process, but it is the Pratt community that will define our future together.
As the planning process progresses, all updates, opportunities, and reports will be published on this page.
Process
Provost Donna Heiland and Vice President for Finance and Administration Cathleen Kenny, together with the Outreach Team, will lead this effort and ensure there is broad and thoughtful consultation with our campus community and external stakeholders. The plan will be presented to the Board of Trustees for approval at the end of this academic year.
Fall 2024
The process will focus on refining Pratt’s mission, vision and values during fall 2024, so it is ready for Board of Trustees approval in December 2024.
Spring 2025
Spring 2025 will be dedicated to identifying the priorities and initiative that will drive achievement of our shared vision in the future. The goal is to have the full strategic plan completed by the end of the 2025 academic year.
Survey
Thank you to all who completed the campus survey. Between October 18 and 28, we heard from nearly 300 members of our community who shared their thoughts about our mission, purpose, and strengths, and how we might build upon those strengths and opportunities to position Pratt for the future.
Workshops
During the month of November 2024 our partners at Windermere Consulting will facilitate a series of virtual planning workshops. During these workshops, they will share the results from the campus survey. Participants will have the opportunity to work with Pratt colleagues to identify important themes and opportunities that should be explored further as we develop the elements of our next strategic plan.
Watch your email for the dates and times of these workshops, organized by role, for students, faculty, and staff.
Resources
Previous Strategic Plan
Below and on the following pages is the previous plan, Creative Education for the Future: A Strategic Plan for Pratt Institute, adopted by the Board of Trustees in 2019.
Creative Education for the Future:
A Strategic Plan for Pratt Institute
Approved by Pratt Institute’s Board of Trustees, May 9, 2019
The Foundation
Following upon the inaugural year of our twelfth president Frances Bronet, Pratt Institute remains committed to transformative academic excellence in architecture, art, design, information studies, and the liberal arts and sciences, building upon our defining history in order to address current and future challenges in education and our world.
From its founding by Charles Pratt in 1887, the Institute has been remarkably inclusive. In almost every discipline, we were among the first colleges in the United States to welcome students of every background, regardless of social standing, race, or gender, offering opportunity to a new diverse professional class, anchored in our surrounding communities.
Today, at a time when the value of higher education is in question, and our own impact on our environment is growing faster than it can be addressed, Pratt Institute is committed to providing collaborative, interdisciplinary, solutions-based education that will help our students successfully address the challenges ahead, now and throughout their careers. We recognize that the face-to-face, nimble learning laboratory that we create here at Pratt, in a manner unique to creative education, prepares our students for future collaborations within and across disciplines, and for lives rich with creative possibility.
In recent years, several initiatives have laid the foundation for the current strategic planning process. Ongoing efforts for sustainability, accessibility, affordability, student success and well-being, curriculum and technological development, master planning for our campuses and physical plants, and collaborations with organizations and communities beyond our gates, locally and globally, have worked in tandem with one another and with the recently completed Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Strategic Plan to lay the foundation of our new strategic plan for Pratt Institute.
These important themes run throughout all of the following pillars, overlap, and are interwoven into one another, in a way that mirrors Pratt Institute’s desire to break down silos and collaborate on our signature values. By implementing the goals and initiatives of this plan, we continue Charles Pratt’s legacy and our history, and will secure our distinctive leadership role in the landscape of art and design education.
Development of the New Strategic Plan
In February 2018, Pratt Institute initiated the creation of this new strategic plan. President Bronet charged the steering committee to create a plan based on an in-depth consideration of “our legacy, our changing context, our strengths, and our opportunities for further growth and success.”
To arrive at this plan, five committees addressed these areas of focus as the plan’s thematic pillars:
- academic excellence;
- student success;
- diversity, equity, and inclusion;
- global education; and
- civic engagement.
The pillar committees were composed to ensure balanced representation of students, faculty, and staff. As the committees met regularly throughout the past year, input from the entire Pratt community was sought through surveys and planning sessions, and a wide variety of needs and recommendations were proposed and reviewed within the pillar planning sessions. Periodic updates kept stakeholders informed, and themes from the emerging plan figured notably in President Bronet’s inaugural address.
Current and Subsequent Planning
Following the model of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Strategic Plan, each of the pillar committees has set forth the following broadly stated, high-level plans for Pratt Institute for the coming years. Their statements, along with goals and summaries of supporting initiatives, lay the grounding vision and direction for the operational planning and implementation processes that will follow.
This strategic plan is, therefore, the foundation of an ongoing process, and the next step requires the input of members across all divisions of the Institute to develop the operational plans that articulate specific initiatives and responsibilities in finer detail for their areas.
The operational planning process will begin in fall 2019. The completed operational plans will be developed over the coming year and published along with this strategic plan on Pratt’s website. The operational plans will also include timelines for implementation, and the processes for ongoing review, reporting, and assessment.