Environmental Justice Strategic Planning

Strategic Planning for Environmental Defense Fund’s Equity and Justice Program Office

What was the challenge?

Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) created the Justice and Equity Program Office to develop and advance the organization’s environmental justice initiatives and to build EDF’s internal capacity to integrate and support environmental justice across its mission areas in the U.S. and globally. The office held over 200 listening sessions and meetings with senior leaders, board members, staff, and community advocates to help inform and identify its strategic priorities. The office also launched a landscape assessment to determine the extent to which the mission areas were already engaged in environmental justice work. The office needed a strategic planner with a deep understanding of environmental justice to help make meaning of its extensive input and research. They also needed a strong process to facilitate consensus among EDF’s senior leadership and board to develop the program’s vision, direction, and priorities over a five-year period. The purpose of the five-year strategic plan was to articulate the office’s purpose, make the case for staffing and funding, and develop a road map to help EDF deliver impact and integrate environmental justice and equity principles in programs, practices, and policies. The office also needed its program strategy to inform EDF’s organization-wide strategic planning. 

What did we do?

MG synthesized and distilled the Justice and Equity Program’s extensive research, translating the results into a strategic framework. The strategic framework outlined the key strategic elements of vision, mission, theory of change, goals, objectives, actions, and metrics. MG also identified existing areas of consensus, unresolved creative tensions, and gaps in information. A key part of this work was helping the program office focus on the organization’s strengths, assets, and opportunities so that its strategy was not mired in correcting deficits and weaknesses. This strengths-based approach helped the program office get clear about the problems they could solve and build on existing organizational capacity, activities, and assets.  

Over the next four months, MG facilitated decision-making sessions with EDF’s Environmental Justice Council and senior leaders to refine and decide the various elements of the strategic framework, including the development of SMART-IE (specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, time sensitive, inclusive, and equitable) objectives and metrics. These facilitated sessions built consensus around creative and bold, yet realistic and attainable goals to foster EDF’s impact and growth.

A strategic plan is more than a compilation of goals, results, and metrics—a plan’s narrative is essential for conveying context, key messages, and meaning. MG’s communications expertise was brought to bear, weaving together the many threads of success stories, stakeholder perspectives, and aspirations into a narrative that explained each strategic element and the plan’s transformational ambitions.

At the conclusion of our work, the Justice and Equity Program Office successfully obtained approval from EDF’s executive leadership and affirmation from its board. The office credits the plan with achieving greater success in raising resources and expanding the staffing of the office. More importantly, the plan is strengthening EDF’s capacity to work with community advocates to design and implement programs and policies that foster the health, well-being, and resilience of communities of color, low-income, and Indigenous populations who are fighting environmental threats caused by industrial pollution and climate change.