Update: Strategic Review

Strategic Review update

There have been a number of developments within the RSA’s strategic review that will be of interest to fellows. At regional conferences across the country, members of the RSA executive team have discussed with Fellows an evolving strategy that is designed to enable the RSA to have greater:

• Focus in terms of its aims and activities.
• Synergy between its different approaches through Fellowship, the Action and Research Centre, and its public dissemination platforms.
• Impact in its ability to influence the positive change in our society. 

In recent months we have opened further discussion about an over-arching worldview view that gives expression to our ethos: the power to create. The idea is about supporting creativity and removing barriers that prevents people from turning their ideas into reality. Watch the new Power to Create short here. You can read more about it in the Chief Executive’s lecture and a recent piece by the ARC Director, Adam Lent, in the RSA Journal.

Alongside the Power to Create, a series of broad change aims have been developed in the main areas of focus agreed by the Trustee Board in 2013:

• Design, Enterprise and Manufacturing: Unlocking Creativity to enable a sustainable, inclusive and dynamic economy 

• Public Services and Communities: A shift in power to people and communities so that they can better meet their social and economic needs and aspirations.

• Education and Creativity: We will lead an approach to learning and development that enables everyone, regardless of background, to generate original, valuable ideas and make them happen.  (Cultivating everyone's ‘creative capacities’ throughout life, focusing in particular on those people and communities who lack opportunities, power and resources, is what we mean by 'closing the creativity gap’ Along with closing the attainment gap, we believe that closing the creativity gap is a precondition for an inclusive and adaptive society.) 

Alongside this we are now producing strategic plans for each of these three areas. There is considerable work currently being undertaken to ensure that we engage actively with Fellows who we will rely on if we are to achieve our aims. It is through individual projects that these aims will really come to life. And it is on the individual project level that we will need the support of Fellows who have specialist knowledge and the energy to get things done.

We will keep you in touch with this review as it develops through this newsletter and through the new web platform that is currently in development. Over the coming months the review and the change aims will really come to life and we look forward to working with Fellows in securing the change we all wish to see.