The Transportation Association of Canada’s (TAC) Board of Directors has worked to produce, and is pleased to announce, new vision and mission statements for the Association.
Vision:
Transportation that makes Canada safe, healthy and prosperous
Mission:
Working together to share ideas, build knowledge, promote best practices, foster leadership, and encourage bold transportation solutions
These statements were drafted, developed and approved as part of the Board’s work to develop a new strategic plan to guide the Association for 2017 and beyond. The full, new strategic plan will be approved by the Board in April.
About the Vision and Mission
The Vision expresses the future state that TAC wants to achieve. It should be simple, straightforward, inspire members to engage in TAC’s work, and motivate others to want to be involved. The vision should reflect WHAT the Association wants to do simply and briefly – if it’s too long to fit on a t-shirt, it’s too long!
The Mission captures important components of HOW TAC accomplishes its work, and describes the essential reasons the Association exists.
- Working together recognizes the value placed on collaboration among TAC members and with other organizations in the transportation sector.
- Sharing ideas is done through our councils and committees, the annual conference, and other meetings and events.
- Building knowledge is the objective of TAC’s projects which address research and practical needs in transportation.
- Promoting best practices is achieved through networking and exposure to others across the country via TAC’s publications and learning program.
- Fostering leadership is done by TAC’s work in education and human resources development, encouraging young people to join the profession and more young professionals to become involved in TAC.
- Encouraging bold transportation solutions underscores the need to think in new and different ways to address important issues, including using new technologies in creative ways.
The Board made sure that the new Vision and Mission statements considered valuable feedback received from TAC’s members and stakeholders through recent surveys, interviews, focus group sessions and a town hall meeting held as part of the conference and exhibition in Toronto.
Stakeholder Feedback
Key findings of the feedback received from TAC’s stakeholders to guide the new strategic plan, are summarized below.
TAC Strengths
- Overall satisfaction with TAC is strong; 84% of respondents indicated that they are either “satisfied” or “very satisfied”
- Publications created with input from cross-Canada stakeholders
- Forum for information sharing and networking
- Work done by volunteer councils, task forces and committees
- Reputation and brand
- Cross-sectoral membership
Areas to Improve
- Speed up the delivery/updating/translation of projects/publications
- Provide better access and outreach to members; actively collaborate with members and related organizations
- Be open, transparent and provide more outreach from TAC committees; involve younger professionals
- Provide more focus and content on urban transportation issues like complete streets, urban mobility and multimodal use
- Make conference and publication fees more accessible
Work On and Communicate About Emerging Issues
- Transportation safety
- Integrated mobility
- Automated and connected vehicles and other emerging technologies
- Electrification
- Climate change
- Active transportation
- Healthy communities
- Big data
- Infrastructure funding and asset management
Next Steps
The full strategic plan will be presented to TAC’s Board of Directors in April 2017 for approval, and will likely use the following (or a similar) framework:
- Who We Are
- Vision
- Mission
- Focus Areas
- Strategic Priorities
- Key Performance Indicators
We look forward to sharing more information, and the plan itself, in a few months.
