Mission Achievement and Goals
The Unity Environmental University Strategic Plan is designed with mission fulfillment at its very heart. Goals are directly and explicitly tied to fully maintaining the status of America’s Environmental University. Service to students and other audiences is prioritized while fulfilling the environmental and educational mission. Everything else is secondary by design.
The three goals in Unity Environmental University’s Strategic Plan outline an interrelated strategy to provide audiences with the products, programs, and services they need.
Goal One: Audience
Serve audiences through engagement with Unity Environmental University and its mission to respond to clearly identified needs.
Goal Two: Enterprise
Establish Unity Environmental University as an Enterprise approach organization that serves as a new exemplar for private higher education.
Goal Three: Storytelling
Share the story of Unity Environmental University through powerful storytelling and inspiring thought-leadership.
The Approach – Iteration in Response to Opportunity
As a national leader in environmental education and social mobility, Unity Environmental University is always finding ways to more fully serve the nation and live up to the best of American tradition: the commitment of service to the whole world. At Unity we understand that being an audience-centric institution goes beyond scheduling around the learners we have, providing service to the learners we have, and offering programs that better fit the learners who already come. To truly be an audience-centric institution we must challenge ourselves to engage with new audiences, explore new opportunities and build new partnerships, making the impossible possible. Unity Environmental University must represent not just America, but the world.
Creating a Model for Private Higher Education Institutions
As the very value, purpose, and viability of institutions of higher education are being challenged, Unity Environmental University must help struggling colleges and universities evolve as an industry in order to itself flourish and lead as America’s Environmental University.
In the mid-2010s Unity thoroughly researched the opposing forces of learner needs, university objectives, and the marketplace through a donor-funded project known as The Deep Dive. What we discovered was that while our mission and our curriculum resonated with our prospective learners, our traditional, two-semester, residential model was presenting an unsurmountable accessibility barrier to a vast majority of potential learners. Modern learners were, and are, looking for affordable, accessible and flexible education that fits into their life and advances their career goals.
As a result of that research, we identified and built the Enterprise Model as our disruptive approach. The Enterprise Model combines the innovation potential of a functional hierarchy and the collaboration between disciplines of a project-based structure. Core Functions such as academic administration, information technology, human resources, financial, physical assets and other services are coordinated and standardized across the University to optimize resources and demonstrate common standards of sustainability leadership.
Functional Areas coordinate resources and integrate key processes that cut across business units and geography, these are known as The Enterprise. This support structure allows our decentralized independent subsidiaries known as Sustainable Education Business Units (SEBUs) to develop programs, services, and/or products that are tailored to audience-specific needs without affecting the entire organization.
As we look to the future, Unity Environmental University is thinking not just about its own viability but that of the collective higher education ecosystem. We know that a new, scalable approach to higher education is necessary for us to remain relevant and it is vital if we are going to flourish as an institution, but it is more than that. We are setting the standard for what a twenty-first century university can be in terms of teaching and learning, fiscal sustainability, place and modality, and service to new audiences.
