Transform recently completed a nearly yearlong process to create a strategic plan to guide our work for the next four years. When we started, despite the fact that I’d been running Transform for close to a year and our work was humming along, I still had many big questions about the organization:
How do all the pieces of our work fit together?
How can we distill our complex work into a few words — and inspire our team and our supporters with a clear mission?
Where do we fit into the ecosystem of our advocacy partners who also work on transportation and housing and also care about climate and equity?
The process of discovering the answers to these questions and creating our plan was fun, fascinating, and fruitful. The strategic planning team and I listened to dozens of perspectives — from staff members, board members, and many others who have been involved with Transform over the years, including funders, supporters, advocacy and community-based partners, and former staff and board members.
We gathered information and opinions and synthesized and discussed the many perspectives we heard. Then we buckled down and thought deeply about all that we’d learned through this process, and also through doing our advocacy and program work. We considered the moment that we are in, which is so different from the last time we did strategic planning, two years before the pandemic began. We looked at the current challenges and opportunities we see in the Bay Area and California, homing in on what makes Transform special and how we can be most impactful in making change.
The result is a thoughtful mission, vision, and strategic plan that builds on Transform’s legacy of 27 years of working at the intersections — of climate and equity, transportation, housing, and land use. The Strategic Plan is live on our site, and I invite you to read it — it’s a pretty fun read, and concise to boot.
I’ll be sharing some thoughts over the coming weeks in a series of blog posts about some of the themes of the strategic plan. I hope you’ll enjoy learning about our plan as much as we enjoyed creating it.
Note: Some of you may be noticing that we are dropping the capital F in the middle of TransForm. We decided upon this change because the landscape of gender politics since the name was created in 2008 has changed the salience of the prefix “trans.” In 2024, the first syllable of our name has a powerful movement and a strong meaning that sometimes leads to confusion about our mission, particularly outside the Bay Area, where our organization is less well-known. So, we are simplifying the styling to “Transform.” We hope that discerning word nerds will continue to appreciate the pun of “trans,” evoking transportation, and “form,” referring to the way that we use space — coupled with, of course, the transformational nature of our work. We will be rolling out our beautiful new logo in the next couple of weeks on our newly redesigned website, and the capital F will become a historical relic.