Growing and Celebrating with Strategic Planning

Each year, our Board of Directors and staff come together to learn how we’ve been growing and celebrating the past year during our Strategic Planning retreat. An important part of this exercise is to set the strategic vision for the next 1, 3 and 5 years for our Playhouse community.

We always start our retreat with sharing celebrations of the past year. This year included:

• Strengthening relationships with our families
• Fostering new community partnerships
• Hosting 4 strong fundraising events
• The incredible number of volunteers and the thousands of hours they give
• Hiring an additional staff member
• Promoting staff to Executive Director
• Growing the number of programs we offer to the ever-growing number of families we serve (almost 400 families now!)

Every decision we make at the Playhouse has our family’s needs at the forefront.

GiGi’s Playhouse Madison Board of Directors and Staff

Our team always works hard and plays hard! Every decision we make at the Playhouse has our family’s needs at the forefront. Throughout the day we reviewed data, compared our metrics to other Playhouses in our network, and gained alignment on things we would like to adjust. This dedicated team takes a full day away from their day jobs and life to focus on the direction we’d like to take the Playhouse.

Throughout the year we continually strive to do the very best we can for our amazing Down syndrome community. One way we do that is through working on the eight Standards of Execution, which are a guide from our national office for how to best run a Playhouse. We are so proud to say that we are achieving our very best on all these standards!

Our Vice-President, Camilla, will be moving away from Madison with her family. We had the opportunity to thank her for her years of service and leadership with our Playhouse community. Camilla started as a volunteer literacy tutor and quickly joined our Board. She willingly took on the Vice-President role and we are so grateful for her passion and expertise on non-profit management. While we are sad to have her move away, we know she will still be involved with our Playhouse in different capacities. Thank you Camilla!

…our Playhouse community is set of for success for a very long time.

GiGi’s Playhouse Madison Board

After 7 hours of honest discussions, constructive debate and inspiration, we can confidently say our Playhouse community is set up for success for a very long time. Thank you to entire board and staff who put in the long hours to ensure our Playhouse is a place where everyone is welcomed, celebrated and supported.

We had some fun with our pop-up selfie station throughout the day!