By John Pappalardo
Strategic plans can sound like documents designed to sit on a shelf. At best that doesn’t happen, because they force an organization to ask basic questions:
What are we here to accomplish? What has changed around us? Where can we make a difference? Where should we concentrate our limited time and resources?
The Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance is reaching that point again.
Our current strategic plan was developed for 2023-2025. It organized our work around four broad objectives:
- Supporting and developing Cape Cod’s small-boat commercial fishing community.
- Being the voice of Cape Cod commercial fishermen.
- Building public support for local fishermen.
- Strengthening the Fishermen’s Alliance so we can continue that work over the long term.
Those have served us well.
They have supported work ranging from fisheries policy and quota access to seafood marketing, working waterfronts, public education, partnerships, organizational capacity and developing the next generation of fishermen. They helped keep us focused on the basic purpose of the organization, maintaining a viable commercial fishing community on Cape Cod.
But strategic planning isn’t about deciding whether the last plan worked. It must address a forward truth:
The world around fishing keeps changing.
Climate is changing. Markets are changing. Regulations are changing. Technology is changing. The cost of waterfront property, vessels, permits, insurance, labor and doing business are changing. Communities surrounding our harbors are changing.
Some of those forces we can influence. Others we can’t.
Figuring out the difference is a big part of this.
After three decades, one lesson has become clear to me:
Understanding the whole system does not mean we are responsible for fixing every part. Organizations can weaken themselves trying to respond to every problem they can see. There are always more problems than time, people and money.
Our responsibility is to understand the system where the Fishermen’s Alliance can have an impact, where are we useful, where we have leverage.
That is the work we are beginning now.
We are not starting with a blank sheet of paper and we are not looking for a new mission.
Fishing remains at the center.
Fishermen remain at the center.
The harder question is how the Fishermen’s Alliance should build on what we have learned and established over the last 30 years.
Our work shows us that the future of fishing cannot be separated from the systems around it. Access to permits and quota is one part of that equation. So is access to waterfront. Good science and reliable information are essential but so are markets, infrastructure, capital, technology, public policy and the ability of fishermen to adapt.
We can’t solve all that.
But we do need to understand how those pieces fit together because a failure in one part can undermine progress in another. A fisherman can have access to quota but no affordable waterfront. A good market doesn’t help much if there is no processing or transportation. Good policy can fail if fishermen don’t have tools or capital to adapt.
Our next strategic plan will need to recognize those connections without turning the Fishermen’s Alliance into an organization that tries to do everything.
That means making choices.
Over the coming months staff, fishermen, board members and others will look closely at what we are doing today, where we have developed real strengths, what is changing around us and where our involvement can produce greatest value for fishermen and fishing communities.
There will be things we need to decide not to do, perhaps stop doing. That can be harder.
Some of the next plan will look familiar. It should.
A strategic plan shouldn’t reinvent an organization. It should sharpen its understanding of the work, maybe narrow in some places while expanding in others.
The Fishermen’s Alliance was created because fishermen understood that remaining viable required more than reacting to immediate problems. It required organization, relationships, information, persistence and an ability to think past the next regulatory decision or fishing season.
That remains true.
Our challenge now is to take what nearly three decades of experience has taught us, account for the whole system and decide where the Fishermen’s Alliance belongs within it.
We won’t predict the future. But we can be better prepared for it, and have some hand in shaping it.
John Pappalardo is CEO of the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance