A woman holds a pill bottle up to a lighted magnifier.

Strategic Plan

A man wearing tinted glasses and a headset sits in an office.

STRATEGIC IMPERATIVE

AFB's strategic imperative served as the guiding statement to provide direction for the development of the key elements of AFB's strategy:

AFB will cultivate in-depth and actionable knowledge and promote understanding of issues affecting children, working-age adults, and older people who are blind or visually impaired. AFB will achieve these ends by promoting and undertaking research that has scalable impact, developing and effectively communicating high-quality knowledge, and pursuing strategic relationships with peers, policymakers, employers, and other influencers in order to engender and accelerate systemic advancement. Priority issue areas may include: education, vocational rehabilitation and workforce participation, vision loss and aging, and technology.

This strategic imperative informs AFB's mission and the development of corresponding objectives and initiatives.

MISSION

A "mission" serves to provide an enduring statement of organizational purpose and expresses the overall aims of an organization. The mission statement for AFB going forward is as follows:

The mission of the American Foundation for the Blind is to create a world of no limits for people who are blind or visually impaired. We mobilize leaders, advance understanding, and champion impactful policies and practices using research and data.

A teacher helps a young girl read a braille book.

ORGANIZATIONAL VALUES

The values of an organization are intended to guide its internal and external culture and decision-making. AFB's core values align with the organization's strategic objectives of producing knowledge, promoting understanding, shaping policy, and ensuring organizational effectiveness. AFB’s values are:

  1. Learning
  2. Collaboration
  3. Impact
  4. Excellence

Value 1: Learning

We expand our expertise and commit to continuous improvement and innovation to create a future of no limits for blind and visually impaired Americans.

Value 2: Collaboration

We empower others, combine skills, and champion inclusion to maximize our collective impact.

Value 3: Impact

We change lives by being bold, delivering results, and measuring our effectiveness.

Value 4: Excellence

We are successful because we invest in our people and their tools, act with integrity, and create value for our constituents, partners, and customers.

OBJECTIVES

Four objectives to support AFB's revised mission were also identified. Together, these objectives present a high-level picture of how AFB will achieve its mission. Specifically, the four objectives are:

  1. Produce knowledge
  2. Promote understanding
  3. Shape policy and practice, and
  4. Pursue organizational effectiveness.

Details around each of these objectives appear below.

Objective 1: Produce Knowledge

Prioritizing a consumer-centered approach with scalable impact, AFB will pursue and catalyze forward-looking knowledge generation on key issues facing people who are blind or visually impaired by fostering collaborations with institutions of higher education and other research organizations, and by conducting limited independent research. Priority issue areas may include (but are not limited to) policy research and applied research in: education, meaningful employment and social/economic mobility, rehabilitation services, aging and vision loss, demographic trends, and technology.

Objective 2: Promote Understanding

With a focus on proactive methods of dissemination, AFB will work to ensure that policymakers, business leaders, professional communities, and public interest advocates have a deep and nuanced understanding of the key trends, challenges, and opportunities facing people who are blind or visually impaired, for the purposes of influencing attitudes and transforming institutional practice.

Objective 3: Shape Policy and Practice

AFB will focus on building and maintaining strategic public and private sector relationships, coalitions, and networks, cultivating its role as a trusted expert advisor and consensus builder, in order to bring about crucial changes to public policies and institutional practices.

Objective 4: Pursue Organizational Effectiveness

AFB will strengthen business practices, steward resources, and cultivate and manage talent to ensure an effective, nimble, and financially sound organization.

A boy wearing a Camp Abilities shirt catches a baseball while others watch in the background.

Next AFB Videos