On a sunny Sunday 27^th July 2014, Gareth Carson (our 2014 Membership & Engagement Director) and Mark Smith (our 2014 Deputy President) ventured south to Birmingham to represent JCI Sheffield at the JCI UK Strategic Planning Forum.  Not perhaps the lightest of topics to tackle on a glorious weekend day, but certainly an extremely important one and a subject we wanted our Sheffield members to be represented about.

We were warmly welcomed on arrival by Kate Senter, 2014 JCI UK National President (who we are very proud is a JCI Sheffield member) and other members of this years National Board including Drew Charman, National Deputy President, Sarah Beckwith, National Personal Development Director and our JCI Sheffield Immediate Past President and National Admin Director Dan Senter.

To help set the scene, the National Board summarized the main themes that came out from the last JCI UK Strategic Planning Forum held in Sheffield back in 2012 which highlighted the following as key priorities:

• History - to learn from the past and grow for the Future

• Chamber Management - for JCI UK to have the necessary resources and training to run a successful and efficient organisation on a national and local level

• Membership - JCI UK will have an engaging membership process which promotes JCI as a lifestyle, encourages members to be active and advance through the organization

• International - every member knows what's on internationally...and they're desperate to come...and they love it and share the love

• Programmes - create leading & well run programmes that strengthen local chambers

• Mission & Values - educate every member so they understand the vision and mission and is working to achieve them

• Sponsors, External Partners and Impact in the UK - to acquire and develop external partners to improve and enhance JCI
• Growth - to have thriving and successful chambers across the UK

We were pleased to hear that JCI UK has been working hard on fulfilling a lot of these priorities.  For detail of how they have done this, click here.

To help consider what are the priorities for JCI UK over the next few years, it is important we carefully look at the recently launched JCI 2014-2018 global strategic plan which calls for JCI Chambers across the world to focus on 5 key strategic approaches:

• Impact - collective action
• Motivate - empowerment, passion
• Invest - long term goals, support, responsibility
• Collaborate - partnerships, unite, common goals, share knowledge
• Connect - link, network, share ideas, actions, results

Please take 5 minutes to watch this video which explains more about these strategies.

The purpose of the JCI UK strategic planning forum was to identify tangible deliverable activities that we can embed into local and national plans for JCI UK in 2015 and beyond aligned to local, national and the global JCI Strategy.  Earlier in the year, several of our members had started feeding in their ideas at the JCI UK Inspiration Day hosted by JCI Barnsley.  The ideas from this workshop were displayed to help us recap on thoughts that members had already came up with.

Locally in JCI Sheffield, as we start to think about our activities and programme for 2015, we will be mindful of making the links with the national and global JCI priorities.  We are proud of the JCI Vision: 'to be the leading global network of young active citizens'.  JCI will continue to fulfill our mission: 'to provide development opportunities that empower young people to create positive change'.

Later in the year we will be holding a planning session for our members to help form our 2015 programme. In the meantime, please tell us about what you think we should be doing more of, less of and anything you think we should start doing. We want your ideas, your suggestions and your comments as our chamber is run by its members for its members.

If you are interested in joining the 2015 JCI Sheffield Council Team, please get in touch with me.  Nominations are now open for 2015 Deputy President.

Mark Smith

2014 Deputy President

JCI Sheffield

Email Mark