Case Study: Strategic Planning for a Rural Legal Aid Nonprofit

People

A bilingual process rooted in community voices

Prosper’s Shared Power™ approach to strategic planning is grounded in a simple belief: the people most affected by an organization’s work should have meaningful opportunities to shape its future.

For CRLA, that meant engaging clients and community members, community committees, the board and its strategy committee, funders and partners, frontline staff, and executive leadership. A planning committee guided the process. The broader group participated through surveys, interviews, values workshops, a two-day retreat, and listening sessions.

The final plan was informed by 172 survey responses and 15 stakeholder interviews with partners, funders, donors, board members, and former staff. Every survey, workshop, and session was offered in English and Spanish, with real-time interpretation at live sessions.

A shared picture of where CRLA stood

Prosper paired stakeholder input with two additional assessments: an Organization Assessment of CRLA’s structure, programs, and systems, and an Ecosystem Assessment that benchmarked CRLA in comparison to other legal aid organizations to identify unique points of differentiation. Together, the assessments surfaced several insights.

CRLA has a trusted, community-led model, but stakeholders recognized a significant opportunity to make large-scale change by elevating those learnings to create system-wide impact. For example, the organization had already supported residents of Nuevo Lago, a mobile home park in Fresno, to challenge a corporate landlord. These residents later bought the park together as a collective, securing permanent housing and keeping their community together. CRLA wanted to put a concerted focus on creating more wins like it. The insights also evidenced the fact that more consistent impact would require re-evaluating how services are delivered and investing in CRLA's people.

The ecosystem research showed CRLA’s distinctive strengths were its rural and indigenous focus and its equity work, including language access, school funding, wage claims, and civil rights, while some peer organizations offered wider coverage in areas like benefits, health, and housing. That gave leadership a clear basis for deciding where to deepen its unique work and where to grow.

Those findings gave leadership and the board a shared fact base for the decisions that followed.

Strategy

From research to four clear priorities

With research complete, Prosper facilitated a two-day, in-person retreat with CRLA’s leadership and board strategy committee. Participants completed a three-year visioning exercise and anonymously brainstormed the strategic questions CRLA would need to answer, such as how to balance structure with flexibility, how to recruit and retain rural attorneys, and how to measure impact for clients.

Those questions were organized into planning themes, including service delivery, growth and funding, recruiting and retention, technology and outcomes, brand and visibility, and board engagement. From there, the group aligned around four pillars:

1. Grow to create systemic change, informed by the needs of the community: Implement a phased growth plan that reaches more people in more communities and grows CRLA’s systemic impact.
2. Ensure all clients have access to all services regardless of location: Create a streamlined structure, rebrand field offices as Rural Justice Centers, and establish practice areas.
3. Develop our people to achieve our mission: Maintain a healthy culture, reduce turnover, increase collaboration across Rural Justice Centers, and boost engagement of staff and board.
4. Create the infrastructure for growth and more impact: Launch a capital campaign for a permanent presence in the communities CRLA serves, and upgrade technology and processes to support data, outcomes measurement, and quality experiences for everyone who engages with CRLA.

Defining what only CRLA can claim

Staff workshops and the planning process also produced a Reason for Being, a new vision and mission, and new core values: Radical, Community-led, Compassionate, and Committed to Justice.

Their reason for being:

CRLA exists to fight for community-led justice. CRLA has a 60-year track record of working together with residents and communities to transform the legal landscape in California. Our team is made up of people, many of whom are from the communities we serve, who are passionate about advancing justice. With input from our client communities, we use legal advocacy, education, and support for community leadership to amplify the voices of those underrepresented in existing power structures and move our society toward equity and justice.

The new vision is a just and equitable world where all communities prosper.

The new mission is to dismantle unjust systems through community lawyering.

Prosper then brought the emerging direction back to board, staff, and community stakeholders through listening sessions. Their feedback sharpened the language and priorities before the plan moved into implementation.

Progress

Making the plan part of daily work

A strategic plan only matters if an organization can act on it.

Prosper worked with CRLA’s leaders to translate each pillar into Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), each with an accountable owner and a deadline. Early key results include developing a phased growth plan, conducting a revenue feasibility study, and developing and implementing fundraising plans.

Every pillar, objective, and key result went into a live OKR dashboard. Prosper also helped CRLA set a regular rhythm: monthly progress updates from leadership, quarterly team reviews and action planning, and an annual reflection and planning review. CRLA has since moved the dashboard into its own internal system, where the team works from it every day.

The OKR dashboard became the way CRLA manages its strategy day to day.