Message from the Steering Group Co-Chairs

Dear Fellow SPH Community Members:

The final Strategic Thinking Report is now available. The report includes edits made in light of helpful feedback from the community on the preliminary report.

The reports of the eight inquiry groups and the key informant interviews will remain available to the SPH community on the Strategic Thinking Steering Group page, but will not be part of the public-facing Strategic Thinking Report.

We wish to thank everyone who was involved in the Strategic Thinking Initiative in any way—participating in roundtables, community-wide meetings, or inquiry groups or offering comments and suggestions—and particularly the members of the Strategic Thinking Steering Group, with whom we were privileged to work closely over the past 11 months.

We also want to thank Dean Galea for initiating the Strategic Thinking process. We trust that the entire SPH community will press forward with efforts to realize our aspirations for the future.

Gratefully,

Wendy Mariner & Vicky Parker
Co-chairs, Strategic Thinking Steering Group

Message from the Dean

Dear Colleagues:

I would first like to thank Professors Wendy Mariner and Victoria Parker, and the entire Strategic Thinking Steering Group—Salma Abdalla, Angela Robertson Bazzi, Dan Brooks, Christopher Gill, Christie Hager, Jessica Leibler, Lisa Toby, and Laura White—for their work bringing the Strategic Thinking Report to fruition. We shall have occasion to formally thank the full Steering Group at a School-wide reception on March 24 at 4 p.m.

I would also like to thank every member of our School community—staff, faculty, students, and alumni—who participated in this initiative. I am immensely proud to be part of a community that has produced a Strategic Thinking Report that is this incisive and thoughtful. The report provides us, as we hoped it would at the outset, with a conceptual framework for our collective deliberations and actions over the coming years. In my note announcing our Strategic Thinking initiative, I mentioned that we would launch “a Strategic Thinking process … to capitalize on the ideas and energy of our entire community … to best position us to be at the heart of the broader societal discussion on assuring the people’s health.”   My assessment is that we have indeed met this challenge together, with gratitude for the Steering Group’s leadership to help us get here.

We now move to the next phase of the process, where we incorporate the principles and research themes articulated in the Strategic Thinking Report in how we operate, and in how we engage with our community internally and externally. We will also take up the questions about our scholarship, education, and translation that the report poses to all of us. As previously discussed at School Assembly, we shall use some of these questions to set our Governing Council and School Assembly agendas over the next couple of years, providing us with roadmap that shall guide our way forward as we etch the School’s future. I look forward to doing this together.

One concrete item I mentioned at the last School Assembly is that we shall have an annual all-School event to allow us an opportunity to tackle collectively next-step issues in our progress towards our aspirations. To that end, and recognizing that scheduling is always extraordinarily challenging, please save the date for Friday, November 18, for a School-wide event. This will also be the day after our November 17 gala bookending our 40th anniversary celebrations, so hopefully most members of the School community will be in town and available.

I shall present my thoughts on the full set of next steps emerging from the Strategic Thinking Report at the January 26 School Assembly, where I shall present a state of the School, looking back to the past year and looking forward to our coming years, informed now by the work of the Strategic Thinking Report.

With gratitude to all for being a part of this process.

Warm regards,

Sandro Galea, MD, DrPH
Dean, Professor
sgalea@bu.edu

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