Planning for Sustainable Growth

The Mary Lee Maier Community Food Pantry was founded through support from the Cunningham Restaurant Group. The pantry was named in honor of Mary Lee Maier, a dedicated kindergarten teacher in Cincinnati for more than 20 years, and an active and involved community member. Her passion and energy in providing kids with opportunity embodies the spirit of the Mary Lee Maier Community Pantry. Today, the pantry serves all Avon Community School Corporation employees and families that have a child in the Avon Community School Corporation. 

As with many nonprofit organizations, the MLM Community Pantry needed assistance planning for a sustainable future. To aid in this process, Bridge Builder Strategies created a comprehensive strategic playbook to set the pantry up for a long and sustainable future. Our efforts began with an environmental, organizational, and peer organizational analysis that was used to identify best practices, external influences, and create a risk/opportunity matrix. 

From here, we conducted stakeholder interviews and collected data on the state of the community. After analyzing all our collected data and doing a combined analysis, we identified 5 strategic objectives the pantry needs to focus on. Once we identified these objectives, we built out timelines to achieve these objectives, tactics to help achieve them, and measures that could be used to track progress toward the objectives. Finally, we used all this information to construct a comprehensive strategic playbook and reviewed it with pantry leadership before making final edits.