How to Set SMART Goals (SMARTIE Style)
No matter what you studied or where your career path led you, there’s a strong chance you’ve heard the term “SMART goals” at one point or another. SMART goals can help you be more productive, improve relationships, live a healthier life, and so much more.
While an incredible tool to get granular about your goals, we knew there was more to it… We needed to make SMART goals even more comprehensive. That’s why the incredible team at HueLife developed “SMARTIE goals” now.
As The Manager Center puts it: Some goals don’t promote equity and inclusion and that’s why it’s important to specify how you’re mitigating disparate impact or advancing equity and inclusion in your tactics, benchmarks, or metrics.
Here’s an example we commonly use from Red Ribbon Week:
Inclusive
To be inclusive, we must include engagement from diverse communities when setting and implementing our goals. Inclusivity requires more than recognizing potential disparity but putting in the hard work to bridge that gap. In the example of substance misuse stigmas, we need to analyze who is leading the conversation and where engagements are held based on class, gender, and power.
Questions we should be asking include:
What unintentional disparate impacts along lines of race, gender, class, ability, access, or power might exist?
What new perspectives would non-represented groups bring?
Equitable
An equity-minded approach engages marginalized groups in decision and policy-making to share power. We can’t truly be supportive if we’re making all the decisions… We need input and agency from groups that don’t have the voice they deserve yet are impacted by these choices. Examples of operating equitably include for a substance misuse event include:
Partnering with organizations within the community where the events are held.
Making accommodations for transportation and pick-up for activities.
Have at least 2 substance survivors as volunteers
Simmer on this question in as you take action on your plan: How can you change the goal to either mitigate that disparate impact or to make equity and inclusion an intentional feature?
Sustainable
So you’ve been successful so far… What’s next? Keep the conversation going! This is where sustainability comes into play. In the case of substance misuse, it’s now time to apply for a grant that would make it possible to annually fund your event.
Now the question is: How do you see this goal being sustained over time (policy, funding, resources)?
Between events, find a way to keep attendees in the loop with resources such as volunteer contacts, blog posts, social media updates, and other valuable material to encourage sustainability within the community!
Keep Rockin’,
Dave
