From Organizational Realignment to Implementation
Gayla Roten | December 30, 2025
While some organizations view strategic plans as milestones to celebrate, simply stating “we have one”, Missouri Main Street Connection (MMSC) sees them as dynamic tools for growth and meaningful progress. Our approach to strategic planning is proactive, energizing, unique, and collaborative, empowering organizations and cities within our Main Street network to turn their visions into reality.
MMSC works with communities in developing these strategic plans that are rooted in the defined structure established by Main Street America and customized with input from the board, volunteers, staff, and community members of each community we work with, all of whom are focused on advancing the community’s goals.
Over the past several months, Gayla Roten and Norma Ramirez de Miess have been guiding The Downtown Joplin Alliance (DJA), a state and nationally accredited Main Street program, through this strategic planning process. For DJA, their organizational structure was the primary focus. The strategic planning process goes through many phases, meaning the content and final plan can differ significantly from what was discussed in the early stages. Through discussions the aspect of strategic planning that involves deconstruction and imagination came to light. As a result, the strategic planning process began to adapt and look more like a Strategic Realignment Process, which will develop a constructive plan that would move the community forward and bring the community’s vision to implementation.
As a large, lively historic downtown with many restored properties and ongoing revitalization efforts, Joplin operates a full-time market facility, manages a busy event schedule, and provides numerous resources to the downtown district property and business owners. Through the deconstruction process the question became, how do we continue doing all this and build on our successes to take on the next big challenges of developing sustainable funding and increasing people’s resources to get the work done?
All of these questions were integrated into the Strategic Realignment Process by Gayla and Norma to establish organizational functions for governance that include the current executive board, board of directors, and committees as well as implementing a foundational board. The ongoing realignment process aims to develop staff balance, re-engage the board and committees, define priorities and goals, determine who will accomplish this work, identify partners, specify timeframes, and establish outcome measurements.
All efforts in the Strategic Realignment Process are designed to support the development and implementation of initiatives that ensure the organization’s long-term success. We look forward to finalizing the process with DJA in January and seeing outstanding organizational achievements in 2026 and throughout their implementation of the strategic plan.
1 thought on “December 30, 2026 – From Organizational Realignment to Implementation”
Excellent information on how the process of realignment works. Best wishes to Joplin as they implement their plan.