We Asked Better Questions. Our Neighbors and Volunteers Gave Us Direction.

Drew Woten, Executive Director, Open Table Ministry

Seventeen years in, Open Table Ministry is building our first-ever strategic plan. If you work at a small nonprofit like me, the work in front of you is always louder than the work of stepping back. But this year, with our partners at 1000 Feathers, we made this type of work a priority.

The easy part was reaffirming who we are. When we looked hard at our own words and listened to what neighbors and partners say about us, the same values kept surfacing — dignity, trust, compassion, and partnership. We didn’t invent them in a conference room. We just wrote them down.

The harder part was deciding what to bet on next. And here’s what I’m proudest of—we didn’t do it from our gut.

It would have been easy for me and our board to name priorities from experience. But experience quietly becomes assumption, and I didn’t want to build our future on what we assumed our neighbors or partners needed. So, we started with questions instead of answers — and getting to the right questions was its own discipline.

Working with Melissa Strompolis, the director of research at 1000 Feathers, we first got clear on our purpose. This wasn’t a satisfaction survey. When you ask neighbors how your organization is doing, you mostly hear “we like it,” which is kind but doesn’t help you plan. We needed something else: information that could move us from serving people in a hard moment toward helping solve the problem underneath it.

Then I took that thinking to our strategic planning committee — staff, board, and people with lived experience — and together we shaped the questions. A few carefully chosen additions to a form neighbors already complete. A short, deliberate survey for our volunteers. We wouldn’t have landed on the right questions without both steps: 1000 Feathers pushing our thinking and our team turning that thinking into questions that fit our community.

Then we listened and found that the answers lined up. When we asked our neighbors which resource is hardest to access, one answer prevailed: housing. When asked what job they’d take tomorrow, top answers included skilled trades and helping others. Similarly, when we asked our volunteers where we should grow, half point to the same place: housing. When we asked them what comes up most with neighbors, two words rose to the top — housing and belonging.

Different people, different questions, same direction. You can’t unsee that kind of alignment.

We’re finalizing our strategic priorities this month and bringing them to our board in September, so I won’t get ahead of that. But the throughlines are clear. And the best part is none of them came from my desk. They came from asking and listening even when the answers complicated our plans.

That’s the lesson I’m holding close: good strategy isn’t about having the right answers going in. It’s about having the discipline to ask the right questions — and humble enough to build on what you actually hear.

To everyone who filled out a form or sat with us in a hard conversation: thank you. You didn’t just give us data. You gave us direction.