Our mission is to help foster innovative solutions to current and future infrastructure challenges.

Our vision is to serve the public and private sectors as the trusted resource for higher standards,

Goal One: Improve the quality of research and educational content. This is at the core of what we do and why we do it. Ensuring the best, most accurate research will help advance solutions nationwide.

Goal Two: Expanding team and broadening our institutional knowledge and capacity. This will allow us to conduct more and better quality research and produce higher quality educational content for all audiences.

Goal Three: With sustainable funding and diverse team, we will launch new areas of research that we have identified as needed or sparse in existing literature. This will elevate solutions to known challenges.

PIFS identifies leadership development resources and conferences and encourages staff and leadership to participate. This includes participation in virtual events and joining networking groups. Additionally, the board of directors and chairman of the board make time to meet with and mentor staff leadership in order to ensure each team member has the resources they need and to stay apprised of the needs and priorities of the organization. Finally, our organization uses a learn-by-doing model with leadership oversight to cultivate leadership skills in all team members. This means that lower level team members receive management projects and tasks like intern oversight or project oversight, which allows them to learn leadership skills by employing them themselves. Leadership then follow up and guides through any issues, as well as checks in when a project is complete to provide feedback, receive feedback, and ensure proper resources are prioritized for that team member.

With the onset of COVID-19, several challenges presented themselves to the organization. These primarily took the form of financial and interpersonal restrictions. While PIFS already strives to be good stewards of donated resources, by eliminating the need for overhead and leveraging remote work, the limitations presented by COVID-19 made this all the more important. Donations and resources were less robust when the pandemic took effect, with several individuals and groups ceasing donations. Leadership quickly streamlined the budget to ensure that payroll and the core programmatic would not be impacted. This also began to impact the more interpersonal level, by restricting in-person events and meetings. To spare funds and protect public health, leadership converted all board meetings into virtual gatherings and ensured all meetings and events that could be completed by video conference, call, email , or other digital means were so converted. Finally, while slimming expenses and interpersonal gatherings, leadership had to ensure that the organizational culture was preserved and that team members had the resources they needed, without being disconnected or strained by the new model. More frequent check ins with the board, leadership, and team members became the norm. From the last year, a new standard operating procedure was implemented with weekly agenda calls between all team members and monthly organizational forecasting. This new procedure helped ensure that everyone organization-wide knew what to expect in the next week and month, gave a platform and space to voice priorities, needs, concerns, and ideas, and helped make communication more robust. In the end, this made up for the interpersonal strain caused by fewer in-person events and meetings. It also ensured that the most efficient possible use of resources is instilled in the whole organization as a culture, so that if and when resources are more available, they will not be wasted.