Welcome to Chandler's 2025 Strategic Planning
The Chandler Board is undertaking a strategic planning process that will help enable Chandler's sustainability and support of the community well into the future. The process its running from December 2024 to March 2025. We need your input, ideas, and feedback to help build a plan that serves our audiences and community.
Please learn about the process and ways you can participate below!
Why are we doing a strategic plan?
The need: Over the past five years, many arts organizations, including Chandler, have faced significant challenges due to changes in foot traffic and in-person attendance since COVID, rising costs in both operations and capital, and staff and volunteers fielding an increasingly busy and complex array of responsibilities to keep things humming.
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Our goals: The Board aims to review and adopt a strategic plan in the spring of 2025 after a thorough chance to discuss the challenges and opportunities of the next ten years with both key Chandler stakeholders and the community more broadly. This plan will help set a transparent vision and clear goals to help Chandler survive and thrive for years and decades to come.
Project timeline: The strategic planning process began around December of 2024 and will continue into approximately March 2025.
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Our process: We began by surveying visitors to the Artisan Market around Thanksgiving 2024. We began outreach to Chandler's key stakeholders and the broader community in January. In February, several group and public events and forums will be held, while internal discussion with staff, as well as review of internal procedures, policies, technology, and finances also takes place. By March, the Chandler Board will start to review draft findings and complete a finalized strategic plan. Chandler engaged Alex Torpey of Rethink Local (a Vermont nonprofit 501c3) to drive the strategic planning process and help collect and evaluate community engagement and future goals.
Ways you can get involved and participate
There are several ways anyone can get involved - and we encourage you to do so. The more reflective of our community our plans are, the better we can do!
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Fill out a community stakeholder survey. This short ten minute survey helps collect some vital baseline data and gives you a chance to share your vision of the community's future. You can access the survey here.
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Attend the open house on Saturday February 15th from 11-3pm. Chandler staff and board members will be available to answer questions, share information, take feedback, and talk through the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead in small group and one-on-one settings as well as several interactive activities for participants to contribute towards Chandler’s vision for the future. RSVP to the open house in the survey form.
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Convince a friend (or even two) to participate. It’s even OK if they have never been to Chandler, we’d like feedback from people with all different perspectives to understand how best to meet the community’s goals for its arts center. Simply forward this to a friend, colleague, or family member, and ask them to complete the steps above!
2024 by the numbers
Programming
Attendance
Community
Over 40 Events
Over 8,000 Patrons
$5,000 Youth Scholarships Given