Strategic Planning for a Public Housing Authority: From No Strategy to a 20-Year Vision.

About the Client

Founded in 1938, WHA is the largest provider of affordable housing in Delaware, managing 1,547 public, tax credit, and senior housing units, administering 3,098 Section 8 vouchers, and operating on a $30 million annual budget, alongside a wide array of resident programs and support services. In 2023, midway through this engagement, WHA and the City of Wilmington were awarded a $50 million HUD Choice Neighborhoods Implementation Grant — one of the largest investments in Wilmington’s housing and infrastructure in decades — to redevelop the city’s Riverside neighborhood. This underscores how much was in motion at WHA as it built its first strategic plan.

Industry Context

Public housing authorities nationwide face a similar structural challenge: demand for affordable housing far outstrips supply, waiting lists commonly run into the thousands of households with multi-year waits, and federal funding levels face ongoing budget pressure and policy change. Against that backdrop, a housing authority’s strategic plan is not an abstract exercise — it is the mechanism for prioritizing which of many urgent, underfunded needs get addressed first, and for giving commissioners, funders, and the public a transparent basis for accountability. Authorities that build that capability in-house, rather than relying solely on outside consultants to hand down a plan, are better positioned to keep executing against it long after any single engagement ends.

Current Situation

WHA’s newly appointed Executive Director found that the organization had no strategy to guide its activities and initiated a project to create WHA’s first comprehensive strategic plan. He had previously worked with Iknow for more than six years while serving as Director of the State of Delaware’s Division of Social Services, and turned to Iknow again to help WHA build the plan.

• No strategic plan at all, despite enormous scale and demand. WHA served over 7,000 residents and managed a $30 million budget with no comprehensive strategy, even as more than 9,500 households waited for public housing and over 6,000 more waited for Section 8 vouchers.
• A leadership goal that added real complexity. The Executive Director wanted the plan built primarily by WHA’s own staff rather than outside consultants, to build ownership and engagement — which meant the project had to include genuine skill-building, not just plan delivery.
• A wide, sometimes competing set of stakeholders. Residents, staff, commissioners, city and state political stakeholders, HUD, landlords, developers, community organizations, citizens, advocacy groups, and vendors all had a stake in WHA’s direction.
• A multi-year process spanning leadership and market change. Stakeholder interviews conducted more than two years apart, alongside a mid-project HUD grant award, meant the plan had to remain relevant even as WHA’s own circumstances evolved.

• Build internal WHA staff capability in strategic planning tools and frameworks so employees could develop, and later own, the plan.
• Conduct comprehensive stakeholder interviews and a current-state assessment covering WHA’s full stakeholder ecosystem.
• Benchmark WHA against peer public housing authorities to identify innovative, transferable strategies.
• Synthesize the research into a comprehensive, Board-approved strategic plan covering a defined long-term planning period.

How Iknow Structured the Work

Iknow structured the engagement into three phases: project team training, stakeholder interviews and a current-state assessment, and creation of the strategic plan itself, remaining intimately involved throughout and guiding the entire process.

Key Activities & Decisions

• Project team training (Phase 1). Iknow custom-designed and delivered MBA-like training for approximately 15 mid-level WHA staff, covering SWOT, PESTLE, and Porter’s Five Forces analysis, scenario planning, benchmarking, business process mapping, financial analysis and reporting for public housing authorities, KPIs, business graphics, and business writing.
• Stakeholder interviews (Phase 2). Iknow and WHA conducted two rounds of stakeholder interviews, in late 2021/early 2022 and again in early 2024, gathering input from 11 distinct stakeholder groups spanning residents, staff, the Board, political stakeholders, HUD, landlords, developers, community organizations, citizens, advocacy groups, and vendors.
• Market and demographic analysis (Phase 2). The project team analyzed Wilmington housing market conditions, demographic trends, and the City’s existing planning efforts, drawing on U.S. Census 2020 data, the American Community Survey, Redfin.com, CoStar, and EMSI.
• Benchmarking (Phase 2). The project team benchmarked roughly 30 peer public housing authorities through secondary research, surfacing innovative ideas that informed new strategies for WHA, alongside SWOT and PESTLE analyses of WHA itself.
• Plan drafting (Phase 3). A subset of the project team and Iknow synthesized Phase 2 findings into a detailed table of contents informed by best practices from other strategic plans, then wrote the plan’s sections over roughly 10 months, interviewing every WHA department head — some multiple times — to build department-level future-state visions and action plans.
• Board review and publication (Phase 3). The project team incorporated feedback from the Board of Commissioners across several monthly meetings, then produced the approved plan in print, PDF, and eBook formats.

Stakeholders & Collaboration

Iknow served as prime contractor, working side by side with a trained WHA project team, WHA department heads, the Executive Director, and the Board of Commissioners across the full three-phase process, engaging 11 stakeholder groups outside the organization along the way.

Building the Plane While Teaching Staff to Fly It

Delivering a rigorous strategic plan while simultaneously building WHA staff’s strategic planning skills from scratch created real risk of slowing the project or compromising plan quality. Iknow addressed this by front-loading a custom, MBA-like training program for about 15 mid-level staff before substantive plan work began, so the project team had real strategy, analysis, and business-writing skills in hand before conducting interviews or drafting content.

Keeping a Multi-Year Plan Grounded in Current Reality

With stakeholder interviews conducted more than two years apart and WHA’s own circumstances changing mid-project — including a $50 million HUD grant award in 2023 — the plan risked becoming outdated before it was even approved. Iknow addressed this by running a second full round of stakeholder interviews in early 2024, late in the engagement, and by keeping the Board of Commissioners engaged with drafts across multiple monthly meetings so feedback could be incorporated continuously rather than all at once at the end.

Quantitative Outcomes

• Staff trained: approximately 15 mid-level WHA employees completed custom strategic planning training.
• Stakeholder input: two rounds of interviews across 11 distinct stakeholder groups.
• Benchmarking: approximately 30 peer public housing authorities assessed for comparative insight.
• Plan scope: a 20-year strategic plan (2025–2044), drafted over roughly 10 months and published in print, PDF, and eBook formats.

Qualitative Outcomes

WHA received its first comprehensive strategic plan in agency history, developed primarily by its own trained staff rather than handed down by outside consultants — directly fulfilling the Executive Director’s goal of building organizational ownership and engagement. The plan was well received by WHA and the Board of Commissioners because stakeholder input was collected continuously and visibly incorporated into successive drafts rather than gathered once and set aside. Following Board approval, the Executive Director moved quickly to begin implementing the plan’s first five-year action period, turning the strategic plan into active operational priorities rather than a document left on a shelf.

Timeline to Impact

Iknow guided the engagement from initial staff training in late 2021 through Board approval and publication in 2024, with WHA beginning implementation of the plan’s first five-year period immediately after approval.

Core Skills

• Strategic planning
• Organizational training & capability building
• Multi-stakeholder engagement
• Benchmarking & competitive analysis

Methods & Frameworks

• SWOT, PESTLE, and Porter’s Five Forces analysis
• Scenario planning
• Business process mapping and KPI design
• Structured stakeholder interviews and peer benchmarking

Technologies & Tools

• U.S. Census, American Community Survey, Redfin, CoStar, and EMSI data sources
• Custom strategic-planning curriculum and training materials