Across the country, dioceses are grouping parishes into families, merging schools, and asking communities that have run themselves for a century to become one. The pastoral discernment is usually well underway. What is often missing is the part that comes next: a written plan of action with owners, timelines, and accountability.
That is what a Collaborative Strategic Plan is. It takes the vision, the principles, and the discernment your Family already has — and turns them into measurable work that specific people are responsible for.
It also engages 75 to 100 parishioners, parents, faculty, and council members from every parish and every school in building it. A plan that arrives from above is a plan that gets survived. A plan people helped write is a plan they carry.
We do not begin at the beginning
By the time a Family of Parishes calls us, its people have usually been through a great deal already. A diocesan pastoral planning initiative. A vision, mission, and values process. A discernment about buildings, finances, and personnel. Surveys they have answered more than once.
The last thing that community needs is a consultant who starts over.
ISPD does not duplicate work that has been done. Before we gather anything new, we read what already exists — your diocesan planning framework, your pastoral priority plan, your discernment findings, your Disciple Maker Index results, your demographic data, your deferred maintenance schedule, your Mass counts and giving trends.
Your existing vision, mission, and values are carried forward, not replaced. Priorities your people have already named are honored and folded in. Then we build the thing that is genuinely missing — the plan of action that makes all of it operational.
We are not a replacement for the work your diocese has asked you to do. We are the process that gathers it into one written, measurable plan.
Who this process is for
If it’s one institution
A single school planning alone is a Strategic Growth Plan.
A single parish looking five to ten years out is a Long-Range Pastoral Plan.
An entire diocese planning across all of its schools is (Arch)Diocesan Strategic Growth Planning.
The Collaborative Strategic Plan is specifically for the middle ground — more than one institution, less than a whole diocese, and everyone in the room has a legitimate claim on the outcome.
Eight Focus Areas
Six, eight, or ten months
The same process runs on three timelines. Where a diocesan deadline is driving you — a canonical unification application, a discernment concluding, a school year turning — that date should decide which one you choose.
Ten months. All eight Focus Areas, one workshop per month. The widest runway for consensus, the deepest engagement, and the most room between sessions for reflection. This is the pace we recommend when a Family wants the greatest number of people meaningfully involved.
Eight months. All eight Focus Areas again — including the Ultimate Question Survey and the Convocation — with a tightened front end and workshops paired two to a month. A strong balance of engagement and momentum.
Six months. The written plan on an accelerated schedule, with two adjustments. The Ultimate Question Survey is set aside, and the Assessment leans instead on your existing survey data and discernment listening. The Convocation is replaced by a half-day Planning Area Summit for the Steering Committee and Planning Team co-chairs. Either element can be restored by extending the engagement a single month. This option asks more availability of your Executive Team and Steering Committee.
Monthly investment rises as the timeline shortens — the work concentrates rather than reduces — while the total professional fee falls. We will walk through all three with you.
Questions Family and parish leaders ask us
No — and we will not repeat it. Diocesan pastoral planning initiatives form the Family and set the principles. Vision and priority processes give you a vision, mission, values, and pastoral priorities. Discernment processes weigh buildings, finances, and personnel and make recommendations to your bishop.
None of those produces a written plan of action with named owners, timelines, and measurable objectives. That is the gap this process fills. We read everything already completed, carry your vision and priorities forward intact, and build the operational plan on top of it.
Structurally. Every Planning Area Team is drawn from all the parishes and all the schools. Steering Committee membership spans every community. We interview each member of the leadership team individually and confidentially at the outset, so concerns surface early and privately rather than late and publicly.
And the Assessment looks explicitly at the relationships between the parishes and between the schools — that is one of the areas we evaluate, not an afterthought.
75 to 100 people serve on the Collaborative Planning Area Teams, 8 to 10 per Area, drawn from every parish and school. The Convocation brings in the wider community beyond that, along with invited delegates who bring outside expertise.
Yes, and it usually must. Deferred maintenance across multiple campuses, thin operating reserves, offertory that has not kept pace with inflation, and a donor base concentrated in older parishioners are the pressures that make Families of Parishes necessary in the first place.
Operational Vitality and Total Stewardship is normally its own Planning Area — including the question of whether and when a capital campaign should be undertaken, and by whom.
A written Plan of Action containing your vision, mission, and values; the process and the people who shaped it; the Assessment summary; each Planning Area with its purpose statement, goals, and SMART solutions; and implementation recommendations with named owners and timelines.
Then a published version of the Plan for your community, a communication strategy, and the structure to carry it into implementation.
Let’s Make Things Happen!
Tell us what your diocese has already asked of you, and we will show you what comes next.
Contact us today to learn more.
