How We Built the Plan
A collaborative process. From October 2024 through April 2025, a taskforce of members, leaders, and community representatives worked closely with staff and board leadership to guide the planning effort. The evolved strategic plan is based on maintaining the unique missions of both organizations under the existing vision.
Discovery and engagement. The process drew on multiple sources of insight, including:
- Surveys of members, volunteers, and stakeholders
- Reviews of historical data and outcomes from past strategic plans
- A landscape analysis of peer organizations
- Focused discussions around key strategic questions
The strategic planning process surfaced lessons learned and new opportunities, ensuring the plan is grounded in real community needs and aspirations.
What We Heard
Stakeholders consistently confirmed the three core areas of focus
- Deploy Design to Make a Difference
How can we amplify the impact of design through advocacy and public engagement? - Prepare Our Communities to Lead
How do we equip the profession and future leaders, especially diverse emerging talent, to shape our communities through design? - Sustain Healthy Organizations
What actions will grow engagement, strengthen resources, and build visibility for both organizations?
From Strategy to Action
The strategic plan is a working tool that directly shapes our annual plans. Each year, staff and volunteer leaders draw from the plan to set priorities, develop tactics, and measure impact. This ensures that our daily work connects back to the long-term vision.
Why It Matters
By working together under this aligned plan, AIA Seattle and the Seattle Design Festival can strengthen both the profession and the public’s engagement with design. Our shared framework creates clarity, agility, and impact, ensuring that over the next five years, we are working to achieve our shared vision of a culture of design that fosters equitable, resilient, thriving communities.
AIA Seattle Imperatives
AIA Seattle commits time and resources to align our work to achieve change in three primary categories that continue to inform all the work of our organization, and complement and inform annual planning under the aligned strategic plan:
Justice, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion: AIA Seattle is committed to identifying, naming and dismantling systemic discrimination within the architecture community in order to nurture universal inclusion and fairness in the built environment, for the communities we impact.
Housing: AIA Seattle is committed to the development of plentiful, quality, diverse, and sustainable housing options for current and future residents of Seattle.
Climate: AIA Seattle commits itself to positive climate action and accelerating our shared goals of a decarbonized, equitable and resilient built environment that allows future generations and ecosystems to thrive.
