As the IFAJ expands its reach and influence, the organisation’s plans for the future are essential to its growth and future positioning. Following an IFAJ Executive meeting held in Dublin in December 2018, a decision was taken to draft a ‘Vision 2025’ plan to develop a strategic outlook and action plan for the IFAJ.
The Vision 2025 Plan needs to support:
- The role and aspirations, and address the challenges for member Guilds, journalists and communicators
- Professional and youth development
- Active participation from existing member countries
- Global outreach, including participation from new important food producing countries
- Affiliations with other global organisations
- Press freedom
The Vision 2025 committee has been chaired by Jane Craigie, supported by four other IFAJ Executive members, Pulack Ghatack (Bangladesh), Kurt Lawton (USA), Jefferson Massah (Liberia) and Jacqueline Wijbenga (The Netherlands).
“The diversity of people and countries represented on the committee put us in a strong position to reflect the IFAJ membership,” says Jane Craigie.
“In order to ensure that the Vision 2025 Plan encapsulates member countries’ needs and hopes, our committee decided to conduct a survey of member countries IFAJ Executive members.”
Survey results
The survey was completed by 28 of the 50 IFAJ member countries. It highlighted the following priorities for the 2025 Vision Plan in order of priority to:
- Make the annual IFAJ Congress more affordable;
- Provide professional development opportunities;
- Offer youth development training;
- Make access to reach individual IFAJ members easier [this has already been addressed with the development of the new member portal to be hosted within the IFAJ website];
- Encourage more regional events;
- Help boost IFAJ participation in member countries;
- Support member guilds in membership recruitment;
- Promote press freedom.
The survey also fed back the following priority objectives for the Vision 2025 plan:
- Making meaningful connections with global/regional organisations, new countries, existing members.
- To ensure fairness, inclusivity and press freedom for all countries and individual members.
- Building resilience of the IFAJ and member guilds in the following ways:
- Economic
- Geopolitically
- People and their skills (CPD, leadership and youth)
Eight-point implementation plan
The following implementation plan was presented at the Executive Meeting and Delegate Assembly at the 2019 IFAJ Congress in the USA and will be adopted at the next IFAJ Executive Meeting teleconference, subject to approval by the Committee. The eight-point plan is as follows:
- To appoint a chair and a board for the IFAJ Foundation;
- IFAJ to create a process and support for member Guilds to approach and enlist key agricultural nations and neighbouring countries in joining IFAJ and to create regional networks;
- Empower the IFAJ Foundation to build partnerships, and create funding opportunities with international organisations named [in the Vision 2025 plan];
- Establish member guild ‘buddying’ to support one another with core challenges, opportunities and operational needs, including providing IFAJ with ‘what’s worked’ case studies;
- IFAJ to create a working group with a mandate to plan a strategy for cheaper, or funded, congress delegate places and other CPD options (e.g. other events, online streaming etc);
- IFAJ to create an international CPD events web page to list IFAJ, regional, member Guild and online events;
- IFAJ presidium to scope a long-term resilience plan for the development of young people and future IFAJ leaders, building on the Masterclass and Young Leaders’ programs;
- Implement a strategy that ensures that inactive member guilds are proactively engaged with to determine any issues and offer support to prevent the IFAJ losing members.
Commenting on the Vision 2025 Plan, Owen Roberts, President of the IFAJ said:
“The vision committee’s recommendations give IFAJ an important roadmap to follow, and a checkbox to tick off as the recommendations become accomplishments. The executive members who contributed to the vision by participating in the committee’s survey can feel confident their input was heard and implemented. I commend the committee for its diligence and look forward to watching IFAJ evolve into the next decade, guided by the vision presented here.”