Every camp reaches a moment when it has to ask itself:

  • Are we still serving our mission in the most impactful way?
  • Are we ready for the future?
  • How do we ensure long-term sustainability while staying true to our values?

For Frost Valley YMCA that moment arrived in 2023. We were emerging from the pandemic, experiencing leadership transitions, and facing a widening gap between our evolving programs and our financial model. The world around us was changing fast — camper needs were shifting, staff expectations were rising, and the field of youth development was being reimagined. In other words, it was our time, too, to reimagine our future and develop a new strategic plan.

To an organization of any size, strategic planning can feel like a daunting task — lengthy meetings, detailed reports, and lofty goals that sometimes end up forgotten. But what if a strategic plan wasn’t just about the future? What if it helped affirm who you are today?

It is our hope that by sharing our strategic planning experience and exploring challenges, big decisions, and unexpected lessons learned, other camps and youth organizations can walk away with actionable ideas for their own strategic visioning — and, in the process, reframe the strategic journey as an exciting one, full of opportunity.

From the outset, our goal wasn’t to produce a rigid roadmap. It was to build a living, breathing framework, shaped by our people, grounded in our culture, and equipped to navigate change. We knew that responding to this moment required more than a new set of goals. It demanded a deeper understanding of who we are, what we value, and how we can adapt while staying true to our mission. We saw strategic planning not as a response to change, but as a way to lead through it. Our new plan needed to be a framework for navigating an unpredictable future.

Character as the Strategy’s Foundation

One of the biggest early challenges we experienced, and we suspect a common one, is the need to balance tradition with innovation. Many camps struggle with this — how do you honor a rich history while also embracing change? We needed a plan that preserved our legacy while preparing us for the future, ensuring that our camp would remain a place where all people, from all backgrounds, could connect, grow, and belong.

Camps have always been a powerful force for character development. The American Camp Association’s Character at Camp initiative (2025) and the Character Lab’s emphasis on strengths of heart, mind, and will (2024) remind us that the growth we cultivate in campers is just as essential within our own teams. What if character development principles could guide our team in how we build an organization’s future? What if the very process of developing a new strategic plan could help us build our organization’s character and culture?

As we engaged with staff at all levels of the organization to develop our plan, we quickly realized that the strategic process was precisely that: the opportunity to practice the skills and to model the behaviors central to character development and a healthy organizational culture. For instance, there were many moments to practice gratitude and kindness as we navigated through opposing and conflicting views, much opportunity to apply curiosity and creativity in imagining a new future, and many chances to develop and grow in our own skill set to engage with different ways of thinking and working. In other words, the strategic process built our individual and collective character.

Strategic planning doesn’t just shape your future — it reveals and reinforces who you are.

An Inclusive and Collaborative Process

Strategic planning is too often treated as a hierarchical exercise — crafted in boardrooms, handed down from leadership, and implemented by staff without their meaningful input. We chose a different path. We recognized that a truly effective and forward-looking strategic plan needed to be shaped with our community, not just for it.

From the very beginning, we set out to build a process that was deeply inclusive, participatory, and anchored in our organizational culture. That meant listening to and learning from the people who know us best — and those who challenge us to think differently.

We sought input from over 250 stakeholders, including frontline staff, summer camp alumni, board members, funders, current campers, and long-standing community partners. We didn’t just ask for feedback; we invited meaningful participation. Every conversation, survey, and roundtable discussion became a thread in the larger fabric of our planning process.

The more people we involved, the more we heard insights we never would’ve considered on our own. That diversity of perspective wasn’t a complication — it was our greatest strength.

To guide the process, we formed a task force that reflected the full spectrum of our organizational ecosystem. Long-tenured team members offered historical context and institutional knowledge, while newer staff brought fresh eyes and innovative thinking. External consultants added a critical layer of objectivity, helping us challenge assumptions and uncover blind spots.

But the most transformative element of this process was the way it empowered staff at all levels. For many, involvement in strategic planning wasn’t just about contributing ideas — it became a leadership development moment. Staff gained experience in strategic thinking, cross-functional collaboration, and decision-making — skills that will serve both them and the organization well into the future.

This wasn’t just strategic planning. It was leadership building, community engagement, and cultural alignment — all in one.

Choosing the Right Strategic Model

Once we established how we would build the plan — with inclusivity and dialogue at the center — the next challenge was choosing a methodology that could carry us forward with confidence and flexibility.

We knew we were operating in a rapidly changing environment where rigid, long-term plans often lose relevance before they’re even fully implemented. Our future planning had to reflect the complex reality of camp and nonprofit leadership: an ever-evolving landscape marked by shifting demographics, climate concerns, funding dynamics, and societal expectations.

That’s why we explored the La Piana Real-Time Strategic Planning (RTSP) model (La Piana & Campos, 2018). It provided a framework for staying mission-driven while remaining nimble, allowing us to seize emerging opportunities and respond to unforeseen challenges without losing our core direction. The RTSP model encouraged us to treat strategy not as a one-time deliverable but as an ongoing discipline.

We didn’t want a plan that sat on a shelf. We wanted a living, breathing strategy that could evolve with us.

In addition to La Piana’s approach, we drew inspiration from complementary models to structure our strategic process:

  • The VUCA lens (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) (Bennett & Lamoine, 2014) helped us prepare for a world where the only constant is change. It encouraged us to plan for multiple scenarios and consider how to build resilience into our operations.
  • The Balanced Scorecard methodology (Kaplan & Norton, 1992) gave us a practical way to organize priorities across key domains — mission impact, financial sustainability, internal processes, and organizational growth — while maintaining flexibility in how those goals would be pursued.

In the end, we embraced a dynamic, iterative approach to strategy development without exclusively using one model. We intentionally avoided locking ourselves into premature conclusions or fixed goals. Instead, we used a mix of practices and models best suited to our reality, letting the process evolve and trusting that clarity would emerge through dialogue, experimentation, and reflection.

By weaving together these models, we created a planning process that was responsive, grounded, and community led — just like our organization itself.

Strategic planning isn’t about predicting the future. It’s about preparing to meet it—with clarity, courage, and the capacity to adapt.

Lessons Learned Along the Way

Looking back, a few key lessons stand out.

Anchor Change in Core Values

Change is hard. But it’s easier when anchored in core values and unchanging truths.

Many organizations, especially ones with rich history, can find it hard to embrace change. Clearly defining what wouldn’t change — our mission, our commitment to inclusion, our focus on outdoor experiences — helped people feel more comfortable embracing new ideas and more willing to engage in difficult conversations about the kinds of change needed. In our experience it is also often true that in any organization, more is going right than wrong; the strategic exercise, then, is an opportunity to create a new and innovative version of everything that is great. Articulating those shared and unchangeable truths allowed external participants and staff to lean in more deeply and ultimately rally behind the plan.

Strategic planning isn’t only about change; it is also about uncovering and affirming the truths you hold dear.

Ensure a Shared Understanding of the Current State

Strategic planning, at its most basic, is helping the organization craft a path from the current state to an imagined future state. But the people who choose to participate and lend their voice to a strategic planning process bring their own unique and highly personal perspective to the conversation, typically shaped by their limited interaction with the program, which leads to varying understanding of what the current state actually is. We found enormous value in creating a foundational document that spelled out in detail our current realities programmatically, financially, and operationally to ensure that conversations were grounded in a shared understanding as we set out to create a future state vision.

Strategic Thinking Is a Skill That Can Be Taught

Throughout the process, we realized that many staff default to operational problem-solving, focusing on immediate challenges rather than long-term strategy. By building strategic thinking skills across the organization, we ensured that the plan would be understood, embraced, and acted upon at all levels. Through a series of meetings, activities, problem-solving challenges, and shared learnings, we helped both staff and committee members to develop a high-level framework that would later be operationalized into goals, accomplishments, and metrics to build essential professional skills in our staff.

A Strategic Plan Is Only as Strong as the People Who Build It

Bringing together a diverse group of voices ensured that our plan reflected our community’s needs. Organizational success is directly related to the staff’s engagement. We needed to engage people from different connection points and different viewpoints to ensure a comprehensive plan that would then speak to the people we serve — people who need to be able to see themselves in the plan to buy into the work. We intentionally included both veteran leaders and participants with new perspectives to balance deep institutional knowledge with fresh thinking.

Looking Ahead — More a Road Map Than a Plan

Too often, plans arrive with great fanfare, only to fade into the background over time as the day-to-day realities take over. But it doesn’t need to be this way; in fact, framing the strategic journey as a character-building opportunity for the staff and the organization sets the stage for successful and continued implementation. We committed to regular check-ins, accountability measures, and ongoing refinement to ensure that elements of our strategic plan are present in our daily work at all levels.

A great strategic plan isn’t just about where you’re going; it’s about who gets to make sure you get there, about who you are today, and about who you will be in the future — both as an organization and as people.

Photo courtesy of Outpost Summer Camps, Poway, CA.

References

American Camp Association. (2025). Character at Camp Initiative. ACAcamps.org/research/special-projects/character-camp-initiative

Antony, N. (2024, June 13). 4 easy ways to strengthen your strategic thinking skills. TrueProject. trueprojectinsight.com/blog/aits/strategic-thinking-skills

Bennett, N. & Lamoine, G. J. (2014, January-February). What VUCA really means for you. Harvard Business Review. hbr.org/2014/01/what-vuca-really-means-for-you

Character Lab. (2024). Heart mind will: What character is and why it matters. characterlab.org/tips-of-the-week/heart-mind-will/

Frost Valley YMCA. (2025). Strategic Plan 2025. frostvalley.org/about-us/strategic-plan/

Kaplan, R. S. & Norton, D. P. (1992, January-February). The balanced scorecard — Measures that drive performance. Harvard Business Review. hbr.org/1992/01/the-balanced-scorecard-measures-that-drive-performance-2

La Piana, D. & Campos, M. M. (2018). The nonprofit strategy revolution: Real-time strategic planning in a rapid-response world, Second Edition. Nashville, TN: Fieldstone Alliance.

Vicky Eddings is the chief operating officer at Frost Valley YMCA. With a background in Zoology and a long career with the Y, Vicky has extensive experience running successful day camps, resident camps, horse programs, environmental education, and conference programs. She is responsible for executing the overall strategy and vision at Frost Valley YMCA. Vicky can be reached at [email protected].

Riel Peerbooms, MSW, is the chief executive officer at Frost Valley YMCA. He joined Frost Valley YMCA in 2023 after 15 years at another camp, Trail Blazers. Built by camp, Riel’s 30-year career as teacher, social worker, mental health counselor and camp professional in educational and camp settings in the New York City and tri-state area, started as a counselor and lifeguard at a summer camp upstate New York. Riel can be reached at [email protected].

Rob Totaro is the director of member advancement at the Alliance of New York State YMCAs, where he supports YMCAs across New York in strategic planning, board governance, and leadership development. With over a decade in the YMCA movement, he has guided countless organizations through long-term visioning processes, including facilitating Frost Valley YMCA’s strategic plan. Rob can be reached at [email protected].

The views and opinions expressed by contributors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the American Camp Association or ACA employees.