Strategic Re-Envisioning Update — August 9

Dear University of Maine and University of Maine at Machias communities, 

I’d like to take a moment in this update to remind everyone of the purpose of the Strategic Re-envisioning (SRE) initiative and provide further transparency around the work being done by our colleagues, work that you can contribute to, and what to expect as we explore the SRE project themes. 

We have embarked on the SRE initiative to answer the question “what would UMaine look like if we were designing it today?” We leveraged a retreat around this question in early May, posed the same question to our Board of Visitors, and hosted a town hall in late May to solicit further input. This process yielded many ideas, thoughts, and additional questions. By working with the president’s cabinet, the deans’ council, and having many conversations, this information was synthesized into the 13 SRE project themes and assigned a Provost’s Fellow or team lead. Those leaders have been charged with conducting a thematic assessment of each of those themes with input from the working groups, which were announced last week. 

Many of you have reached out and asked: what is the work, what is happening, and most importantly, how does this affect me? 

The ongoing thematic assessments around each theme are designed to explore data, reports, benchmarking comparisons, and opinions from community interviews to generate a working hypothesis for each theme to answer our question “what would UMaine look like if we were designing it today?” SRE leadership has borrowed from our own Innovation Engineering™ curriculum to develop an SRE Idea Prototype Tool designed to help us explore these themes as a community. 

This week, we invite you to try using the SRE Idea Prototype Tool to define your potential re-envisioning of our institution. We also welcome new hypotheses for each SRE theme, which can be submitted to Sabrina and James at their respective email addresses.

Sincerely,

Joan Ferrini-Mundy
President