As the strategic planning process evolved, the following themes emerged. The eventual strategies and actions recommended by the Task Force Groups address these themes and center around student success, support for faculty and staff, creating a productive campus environment, and building effective relationships with the community.

• Helping Students Succeed: The Leadership Team felt strongly that a top priority for UHD must be maintaining and re-examining what it means for students to be successful in today's educational, professional, and community environments. The recommended strategies and actions tend to revolve around the notion of engagement, both internally and externally. It is advantageous to the student, the institution and the community when students are encouraged to build relationships with those entities.
  
  
• Supporting Faculty and Staff: The Leadership Team acknowledged the critical role faculty and staff play at a higher education institution by including a number of measures aimed at strengthening and nurturing those bodies. The spirit of the plan calls for investing in a culture of professional and personal development in which well-qualified and diverse faculty and staff will thrive and therefore contribute to student and institutional success.
  
  
• Building a Campus Community: UHD has always prided itself on being a close-knit community. That concept has been challenged as we have grown in enrollments, buildings and teaching locations. Significant effort has gone into providing additional space for our growing student body. With the latest addition to the physical plant, the Shea Street Building, UHD has been recognized as a force in helping to reshape and revitalize Downtown Houston's north end. A high priority of the planning team was keeping the small campus feel by taking UHD from a collection of teaching sites to a true campus community.
  
  
• Strengthening Community Relations: At no time in history has it been more critical for universities to be recognized as partners within their communities.  It is important for UHD to inform the community about what it can offer in the way of professional and cultural resources, along with workforce development. It is equally important for the university to continue to build strategic alliances that will position its graduates well for their transition from being successful members of the university community to being successful members of the larger community.