Club greenlights five-year strategic plan
The National Press Club recently gave a greenlight to its 2024-2028 Strategic Plan, which lays out the visions and goals for the next five years.
The plan, which includes 36 goals in eight categories including membership recruitment, security, professional development and press freedom, received unanimous support from the board and strong support among members at the Annual Membership Meeting.
The report can be read in full here.
How this plan came together
The Strategic Plan has been almost a year in the making. It started last spring with several wide ranging discussions and brainstorming about the plan, and then honing those ideas into tangible goals and action items.
Hearing from membership was also important. Thank you to all who participated in focus groups or took the survey. Feedback from both was used to inform our overall goals and fine tune our focus on what members want.
The core team that drove the plan from ideas to completion includes immediate-past President Eileen O’Reilly, President Emily Wilkins, Vice President Mike Balsamo, Secretary Poonam Sharma and Membership Secretary Mark Schoeff, Board Communicator Governor Mike Smith. Executive Director Didier Saugy and former Executive Director Bill McCarren were a part of the team as was Membership Director Kate Helster and Director of Clubhouse Operations Miguel Dominiguez.
A few highlights
The Strategic Plan includes a wide array of goals to meet the needs of our members. These include making it easier to work at the Club, improving communications to members and between member teams, and strengthening professional development activities and the job board.
One of the most ambitious pieces of this plan is to streamline the Club’s most important press freedom missions in a single place - a center for press freedom. This center would house a small team focused on advocating for detained reporters including Austin Tice, Evan Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva, supporting reporters who are exiled from their home countries and are now living in the U.S., and ensuring the safety and well-being of domestic journalists.
The plan also set a vision for recruiting new members, with a potential change to membership categories. These could include a “friend of the press” category for those who support press freedom and the families of journalists who have been unjustly detained. Another category can include professors, teachers and press freedom advocates.
Making these changes could require a change in the Club's constitution, which would require a vote from membership. The president and staff will examine the process for moving forward and update members if there will be a vote.