Strategic Planning

Strategic planning is about more than creating a document or checking a box. It’s about bringing the right people together, making space for the voices that matter, and creating a shared direction people are ready to move forward.

Silver Linings International designs and facilitates inclusive, engaging strategic planning processes that help organizations, collaboratives, coalitions, and cross-sector initiatives understand where they are, imagine what’s possible, identify what matters most, and turn shared priorities into meaningful action. Using trauma-informed facilitation, Appreciative Inquiry, stakeholder engagement, and practical planning strategies, we help groups create plans that are not only thoughtful, but realistic, actionable, and built to be used.

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North Carolina Department of Health & Human Services:

NC Healthy Transitions Initiative 2.0

July 2024 - current

Topic: Strategic Visioning to Support Youth Transitioning into Adulthood

Audience: State & regional agency leaders, behavioral & mental health providers, & community-based partners

Format: 1 In-Person Kickoff + 4 Virtual Facilitation Sessions

Silver Linings International partnered with the North Carolina Healthy Transitions (HT) 2.0 initiative to co-design and lead a statewide strategic planning process focused on collaboration, innovation, and youth voice. Working closely with project leadership, we facilitated a highly interactive kickoff that brought together key stakeholders—some still recovering from Hurricane Helene—to co-create a shared vision and roadmap for supporting youth and young adults (ages 16–26) with serious mental health challenges.

The in-person kickoff featured visioning exercises, interactive mapping of transition points, connection-building activities like “Bingo,” and analysis of pre-survey data. Teams identified immediate actions aligned with three shared goals:

Improve coordination across support systems
Expand youth-led mental health supports
Increase access to life skills training and financial literacy

Follow-up virtual sessions helped teams refine priorities and begin implementation—ensuring that ideas from the kickoff led to concrete next steps.

“This process gave us the clarity and connection we needed to move forward with purpose.”

“Debra helped us move forward from recovery to resilience.”

This initiative demonstrated the power of trauma-informed, appreciative facilitation to align stakeholders, spark innovation, and build momentum for lasting, youth-centered change.

Regional Collaborative Strategic Planning

Northwest Ohio Trauma-Informed Care Collaborative

June–November 2025
Format: Strategic Planning Process + Micro-Training Series + Needs Assessment
Audience: Cross-sector community leaders and organizational stakeholders

Silver Linings International partnered with the Northwest Ohio TIC Collaborative to guide a regional initiative focused on strengthening trauma-informed systems and collaboration. The engagement launched with a brief trauma-informed micro-training and continued with a three-part virtual strategic planning series grounded in Appreciative Inquiry and SAMHSA’s trauma-informed principles.

To support engagement and accessibility, we developed a custom web page to share updates, host the recorded training, and collect data through an online needs assessment. This helped streamline participation and ensured broad community input.

Through this inclusive process, community partners from education, healthcare, law enforcement, and beyond came together to explore shared strengths, clarify their collective purpose, and co-create an actionable plan for regional growth.

Key outcomes included:

A community-informed needs assessment and SOAR analysis
A unifying purpose statement and identity for the Collaborative
A 2026 action plan for education, engagement, and sustainability

“This process gave us the clarity, energy, and connection we needed to take real action.”

This project exemplifies how trauma-informed facilitation and digital tools can strengthen collaboration and drive meaningful, cross-sector change.