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Raleigh Strategic Plan Overview
Together, We Make Big Ideas Happen
Building Raleigh’s FY26–29 Strategic Plan has been a thoughtful, collaborative effort. We started by reflecting on the successes and lessons learned from the FY21–25 plan, gathering feedback from staff, leadership, and external experts. We then listened closely to residents and employees to better understand community priorities and everyday experiences. The Strategic Plan is our playground to innovate, experiment, and bring new ideas to the City of Raleigh.
FY26-29 Strategic Plan
Raleigh’s Strategic Plan focuses the City’s attention on some of our community’s most important opportunities and challenges. It lays out the outcomes we want to achieve over the next four years and the work we will undertake to make measurable progress toward them.
Rather than capturing every service the City provides, the Strategic Plan highlights a small set of priorities where focused effort, coordinated work, and new approaches are needed. These priorities are selected through City Council direction, resident input and experiences, and the broader economic and societal context. We also consider the City’s capacity to implement and sustain meaningful change.
This intentional focus allows Raleigh to drive progress on the most urgent and high‑impact issues, while continuing to deliver essential programs and services through departmental business plans and daily operations. If a topic does not appear in the Strategic Plan, it does not mean it is unimportant. It simply means that it is being advanced through other City efforts, or that it is not part of this specific, time‑bound set of priorities.
Ultimately, the Strategic Plan helps Raleigh work differently: concentrating resources, aligning departments, and investing where the City can make the strongest difference for our residents over the next several years.
How Raleigh is Tackling These Challenges
Before we invest in a solution, we want to make sure we understand the problem. City challenges are often complex. What looks like a simple problem may have different causes depending on who experiences it. That’s why teams are combining data, staff expertise, and residents’ lived experiences to understand what is happening before deciding what to do.
Phase 1: Learn & Listen (Fall 2025 to Summer 2027)
Understand the challenge before deciding on a solution. Teams combine data and research with the experiences and priorities of the people affected to identify what's really happening, where we can make a difference, and promising ideas to explore.
Phase 2: Test & Refine (Summer 2027 to Summer 2028)
Try promising ideas on a small scale. Teams gather feedback, measure results, and refine their approach to understand what works and develop evidence-based recommendations.
Phase 3: Turn Ideas into Action (Summer 2028 to Spring 2029)
When an approach shows promise, teams work with City departments to put it into practice, building the processes and resources needed to create lasting improvements for Raleigh residents.
Why we're working this way
- Solve the right problems by understanding what's happening before choosing a solution.
- Design with people, not just for them by learning from those affected by the issue.
- Explore new possibilities instead of automatically defaulting to familiar approaches.
- Learn before making larger investments by testing promising ideas on a smaller scale.
- Adapt based on evidence as we learn what works and what doesn't.
Explore Raleigh's Strategic Plan
The Strategic Plan is organized around seven Key Focus Areas representing important priorities for Raleigh's future. Within them, City teams are working toward specific objectives through 49 initiatives.
Want to go deeper?
Our Strategic Plan Dashboard provides detailed information about the objectives and initiatives underway as well as recent progress.
If you cannot see the PDF Viewer. You can download the PDF file instead.
Your Voice in the Strategic Plan
Data can help us understand what is happening in Raleigh. The experiences of residents, businesses, community organizations, City employees, and others affected by an issue can help us understand why it's happening and what might work better.
Different questions require different perspectives. Depending on the issue, teams may learn from residents who have experienced a particular challenge, businesses, community organizations, City employees, subject-matter experts, or other stakeholders.
That means not every Strategic Plan project will involve a citywide survey or engagement opportunity. Staff will consider whose experiences and expertise are most important for answering the questions they're exploring.
Ways to participate
Our approach involves many ways of gathering feedback. Opportunities may include:
- Participate in an interview or focus group
- Take a survey
- Attend a workshop or community conversation
- Provide feedback on an idea or prototype
- Participate in a pilot or test
What happens to your input?
Teams combine what they hear from the community with service and system data, external research, operational expertise, available resources, and other considerations. Community input may help teams redefine a problem, identify an unmet need, improve an idea, or decide whether an approach should move forward.
Sign up to be notified by email when these opportunities are available.
If there aren't active Strategic Plan opportunities, we encourage you to check Engage Raleigh for opportunities to provide feedback for other City projects.
