Four questions about Reach Higher Together

March 17, 2026 (Volume 49, Number 13)

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With an eye toward the future, Grand Valley’s Board of Trustees on February 6 approved a revised university strategic plan, Reach Higher Together, that commits to increasing the university’s impact on its students and the communities it serves. 

Photo Credit: Kendra Stanley-Mills

Grand Valley’s Reach Higher Together strategic plan was shaped by input from more than 7,500 students, faculty, staff, alumni and community members. Built around four commitments, this plan will guide the university’s work and priorities over the next five years. Laura Aikens, vice president for Institutional Advancement, has helped drive this effort forward, and she shared what comes next and what these commitments mean for Grand Valley’s future. 

Aikens and others will host Reach Higher Together Explainer and Insight sessions on March 31 and April 1 to continue shaping GVSU's shared strategic plan. RSVP for either session here.

The Board of Trustees adopted the Reach Higher Together strategic plan last month. What comes next?
What the Board adopted are the guiding commitments that sit at the foundation of Reach Higher Together. I think of these commitments as our promises: the promises we are making to our students and to our community about who we want to be and what we want to accomplish.

The next step is doing the work of connecting those commitments to action. We need to be able to clearly articulate how the work happening within our colleges and units relates back to these shared commitments, how divisional plans connect to our collective promises.

Over the winter semester, we’ll be workshopping key integration points with a campus task force. That work is really about pressure-testing how we deliver on these promises and how we measure progress. The commitments give us the direction, and now we’re building the alignment and the structure that will help us move forward together and track our success over the next five years.

More than 7,500 people participated in this process. What did you learn about our students, faculty and staff?
We learned a lot of valuable insights from this process, and I would encourage everyone to take the time to review our compiled data on the Reach Higher Together website. But one of the biggest things I learned is just how much we have to be proud of at Grand Valley.

Throughout this process, our students, faculty and staff affirmed our commitments. We heard over and over again that they reflect what matters most to us and they reflect the work that is already happening in real and powerful ways across campus.

One of the big takeaways for me was that Reach Higher 2025 was purposefully broad, and that allowed for amazing things to happen. But what we heard through this reflection process is that our community wants to know how we will focus our work moving forward. Reach Higher Together helps us narrow in and pursue excellence in a way that is interdisciplinary, cross-divisional and shared.

Even in a tumultuous time for higher education, what came through clearly is that we are a community that is engaged, excited and ready to embrace what’s ahead.

What does the strategic plan mean for prospective students?
Prospective students care about the kind of institution they are joining and what that institution is promising to deliver. The Reach Higher Together commitments are the promises we are making to those students as part of their educational journey, and the strategic plan is how we will deliver on and keep those promises.

Reach Higher Together reflects that we are thinking seriously about the future of learners and the future of higher education. It brings forward priorities like digital literacy, artificial intelligence, flexible learning pathways and the need to adapt to changing student expectations. At the end of the day, this plan signals that we heard what learners are asking for and we are making the moves necessary to meet those needs and prepare students for a rapidly changing world.

The fourth commitment, Impact-Driven Discovery, what does that mean?
Universities essentially do two things: we educate the populace and we create new knowledge. This fourth commitment is a way to really lean into that second piece. It is a way of elevating knowledge creation as part of Grand Valley’s institutional promise.

At Grand Valley, our discovery work is not primarily about basic research for its own sake. What we are more interested in is applied research and scholarship that connects directly to real challenges and opportunities in our communities. How can we be force multipliers? How can we help create solutions to wicked problems? How can we contribute knowledge that has purpose and impact beyond campus? This commitment also acknowledges the important work our faculty do through the teacher-scholar model. Impact-Driven Discovery is a promise that we will support that work, elevate it, and ensure that discovery at Grand Valley is tied to meaningful outcomes in the real world.

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