Revisions to UFV’s mission, values, and vision statements — a process started at the beginning of UFV president Joanne MacLean’s term — have been finalized and were approved by Senate and the Board of Governors in early May.
UFV’s vision was announced to be: “UFV will be known as a gathering place for learners, leaders, and seekers. We will pursue diverse pathways of scholarship, leading to community connection, reconciliation, and prosperity, locally and beyond.”
The university’s mission will be: “Engaging learners, transforming lives, building community,” and its four core values are integrity, inclusivity, community, and excellence.
Community feedback was essential to president MacLean in developing these statements.
“As a scholar I’ve studied values-based behaviours, and I think that all of our personal values must align with institutional values,” MacLean said over email. “Otherwise, you are engaging in things at work that you don’t believe in. This is counter-productive in so many ways and will not make you happy.”
An early step to the visioning process was gathering community input through a digital platform called Thoughtexchange in November about UFV’s most important values, participants’ thoughts on the university’s existing values and mission, and how they would describe UFV’s core purpose in less than ten words.
From the community feedback, the Visioning Steering Committee determined community, excellence, inclusivity, and integrity as the values central to UFV’s day-to-day processes. The committee was comprised of students, faculty, staff and administrators, alumni, and community partners, and was designed to deliberate on community input and advise the president.
A second Thoughtexchange forum ran January 8–23 and asked participants what they felt needed to be considered in developing a vision for UFV’s future, and what the university should do to foster lasting endurance. From the feedback, UFV’s new vision statement was formed.
“I believe that having statements that accurately identify our aspirations as an institution are fundamental to achieving our goals,” MacLean said. “Engaging a process that allowed everyone at the university to voice their opinion about our values, mission, and vision has enabled the development of statements that all employees can identify with.”
A consensus on the new mission statement had not yet been reached after the November Thoughtexchange, though the steering committee focused on the idea of building community. Other points of discussion for the new mission statement were “engaging minds” and “transforming lives,” pairing with UFV’s Halq’eméylem coat of arms motto, which translates to “house of transformation” and embodies the idea of the university as a place of transformation in both character and learning. In March, the steering committee reviewed the data from consultations and developed their recommendations for the president. These values were combined to create the final version of the mission statement: “Engaging learners, transforming lives, building community.”
“It is my hope that all our faculty and staff, full and part-time employees, see themselves and the importance of their work in helping the institution thrive,” MacLean said. “The efforts of all of us are key to our success.”
