OL 344 Assignment One Homework
Online Learning: OL 344 Community Based Adaptation to Climate Change: Sustainable Implementation.
Center for Sustainable Development
https://csd-i.org/ol-344-adapting-climate-change/

This week’s resources:
Class Home Page 344
OL 344 Assignment One Discussion
Magee Example Project 344 Assignment 1

OL 344 Specialized Links to Adaptation Documents and Sites
101 Hands-On Field Activities for Community Based Adaptation Projects

OL 341: 50 Programs and Activities That You Used In Your First Project Outline
http://training.csd-i.org/links-cba-specific-sites-docs/

Assignment 1. Empowering community members in co-managing the project.
Getting started.
If we’ve done our job well, the community feels as if this is their project, and that we are their sub-contractor who is coming in to do some specialized activities. Think about it as if the community is building a house, and we are simply the electrician. We come for a short period of time, do our job, and leave. The community lives in and maintains the house for the next 50 years.

Part 1:
Distributing Project Activities.
The good thing about the community being involved in the implementation of a project is that their contribution will increase ownership (free handouts are rarely maintained), and the work that they do will be a learning opportunity for them so that they will be able to maintain the outcomes of the project launch in the future.

In assignments seven and eight of the previous course (OL 343), you worked with the community to form a project committee. During your meetings with them you asked them to prepare a list of the project activities which community members would be willing/interested in doing. This week will be the time to organize these activities and formalize those commitments.

The community will have a larger number of time and financial constraints than your NGO will; that needs to be taken into consideration when assigning tasks. Your NGO has funding and staffing for specific project activities and materials; your budget may even have funding for a work-for-pay or work-for-food relationship with some of the community members.

So this week, after reviewing their lists of preferred activities, you need to go back to your log frame/budget/schedule and allocate which project activities will be done by community members and which will be done by your organization. Be sure to bear in mind that in this decision-making process, the paramount importance is the need for community engagement, the community’s understanding of project processes, and training. Make a list of the best activities that community members could be involved in—either individually—or working together with your organizational staff members.

Part 2:
Preparing project documents for the community.
NB: You only need to do this for one of your project’s programs.

Let’s face it: you all have developed some pretty sophisticated documentation in the past three courses. It’s conceivable that these documents may not be appropriate for your community to use. However, they are going to need tools that will allow them to co-manage the project.

This can be looked at in two ways—1. a global picture of the project—and 2. a series of activity specific how-to cards. The global picture would be a simplified version of your whole project, the how-to cards would be their specific tasks.

If your community is literate you can simply really simplify your log frame and schedule for the global picture. It would be so simple that it would almost look like the very early project outline that you did. Feel free to get creative here—what we want is communication in a form they will easily understand.

If your community is not literate you may need to do a series of simplified drawings that show the steps.
As far as the how-to cards, you’ve already done that in the first course you took. So I want you to take one activity that your community will do in the project and draw a very simple how to card; this can be a single page and the elements can be copied and pasted from the Internet.

So in this part of the assignment, that’s what I want you to do, simplify the project in a manner that they can understand it. I will leave the format and presentation up to you: surprised me!

Arrange a meeting with the committee to present their new tools and to discuss the project launch.

Follow the Magee Project Example exactly – it is what we are looking for. Pull it up on your screen and type right over it.

The complete Assignment One homework to turn in will be:
1. A list of project activities community members will be responsible for.
2. Simplified local descriptive project management tools to be given to the community members as a roadmap.
3. The date for your meeting with the committee.

Go to Magee’s Example Project Assignment 1 to see what this could look like.

See you next week.