City of Hayward

The City of Hayward wanted to create its first citywide strategic plan in order to align the priorities of City Council with the day-to-day efforts of staff. We started by facilitating Council’s yearly retreat where we co-created a compelling three year vision. With the participation of the City’s Executive Team, we boiled down that vision into six strategic priorities and then brainstormed specific projects that would accomplish each priority.  With a draft in hand, we held three public ‘pop-ups’ throughout the City to let the community provide feedback.  

Finally, the project lists were vetted with staff who used their subject matter expertise to refine and ‘right-size’ the projects to existing capacity and resources. We are proud to announce that the Strategic Plan was unanimously passed by City Council! The result is a direct line-of-sight between Council’s overall vision, the community’s preferences, and the daily work of staff. 

Not only does Hayward now have a roadmap to the future, but many stakeholders were instrumental in its formation, improving their commitment and buy-in. As we always say, the process of strategic planning is just as important as the product

“CivicMakers was a great partner with the City of Hayward in preparing our first Citywide strategic plan that was unanimously approved by our City Council. They were exceptional at responding to the City’s needs, preparing graphically attractive deliverables, and collaborating closely with the City Council, employees and community members. We would definitely work with CivicMakers again.”

– Jennifer Ott, Deputy City Manager, City of Hayward

In 2019, we hosted more client-sponsored trainings than ever before, a total of 18 (not counting the Learning Labs mentioned above). Introduction to Human-Centered Design continued to be a popular request, which we brought to clients like California Health and Human Services Office of Innovation, Napa County and San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. Other topics included Presentations & Storytelling, Facilitation/Train the Trainer, Building Effective Teams, and Human-Centered Change Management.

We also had the opportunity to participate in some meaningful collaborations in curriculum design. One included our good friend, Andy Krackov, and his firm, Hillcrest Advisory, in the co-design of a three day Presentations & Storytelling training for the Information Security Leadership Academy at the California Department of Technology. We may have learned more from the participants than they did from us!

Another collaboration took Judi all the way to the Western Balkans for a five-day training on digital transformation and collaboration with teams from Montenegro, Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia and North Macedonia. Judi co-created curriculum, traveled and co-facilitated alongside experts in public sector innovation from all over the world! Check out this ten minute documentary to see us in action with a cadre of inspiring innovators.

In addition to training, we facilitated eleven different workshops across California and even Minneapolis! Some, including User Journey Mapping for the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services and Community Visioning in the City of East Palo Alto were part of our multi-year partnership with FUSE Corps. We also facilitated an interactive session with our friends from CHHS Office of Innovation at the 2019 Data Expo. Watch for some of the post-its we collected from 200+ participants in this talk from newly minted Secretary, Dr. Mark Ghaly, about leveraging data to improve service delivery throughout the state.