Drafting our Strategic Framework

We’re ready to put our vision into action—and have started drafting our strategic framework. Berea College is using a dynamic, flexible strategic planning process to capture both our great work underway and our hopes for an even better Berea. Titled “Vision into Action,” this new form of strategic planning is focused on ensuring that our ideas are translated into real results as quickly and effectively as possible.

“Vision into Action” is a testament to the high-quality feedback received during President Nixon’s Listening Tour—an open, honest, collaborative sharing of ideas and insights, hopes and dreams, questions and concerns. We are committed to moving the ideas shared during the Tour into actionable strategies that enhance the student experience, foster academic excellence, and strengthen our campus community. As our campus priorities come into focus, we are shaping our overarching Vision and mapping the Actions that will bring that Vision to life. We share our current drafting here.

What are the “next horizon” aspirations we have for Berea?  As we draft our framework, campus conversations have shared visionary ideas such as:

• Access & Affordability - Berea is the #1 college in the nation for access (NYTimes) and the #1 college in the nation for graduating students with the least debt (US News & World Report). How can we strengthen and build on this foundation to create new forms of access and affordability?
• The Future of Thinking & The Future of Work - As a top liberal arts college and a top work college, how can we prepare students for new forms of thinking and new forms of work? How can we strengthen human intelligence in a world of artificial intelligence?
• Head, Hand, Heart: The Transformative Student Experience - How can we create a truly transformative student experience—one that ensures new possibilities, while also serving the whole student? With our valuing of academic excellence, work, and spirituality, can we create a new type of student experience?
• One Blood, All Peoples: New Understandings of Diversity - Berea is the first interracial, coeducational college of the South. How can we help higher education create new understandings and institutional commitments to DEI?
• Belonging, Meaning & Mattering - Our Great Commitments provide a moral framework that is rare in higher education. How can our Great Commitments create new a new type of campus community and a new type of belonging: our students will find meaning at Berea—they matter to us and in this world. Can our Commitments prepare our students to tackle the “wicked problems” of the future, such as climate change, poverty, political instability, and disease?  

Students First

The Student Experience in our Beloved Community

Berea aspires to offer an environment of possibility and promise, where students can further develop the gifts they bring to us, access resources to grow, explore knowledge to expand horizons, and be empowered to shape the complex world ahead.

Berea Balance

Serving Self, Campus, and “One Blood, All Peoples” 

Berea aspires to create a culture of radical love: our community welcomes all into an integrated ecosystem that connects the impartial love of all peoples to the love of place, self, and service.

Financial Freedom

Resources & Infrastructure for Choice, Opportunity, and Stability

Berea aspires to create new models of freedom, mobility, and stability: Berea will steward its human, environmental, technological, and financial resources to provide a stable and secure foundation for Berea’s next visionary chapter.

Our Great Commitments

Our Eight Great Commitments inspire and are interwoven into this framework and future action items

Berea aspires to continually uphold and advance the inspirational ideals of our Great Commitments: we strive to build a culture of possibility and hope, strengthening our resolve to bring our values and principles to address the most pressing challenges of our time.