OL 345 Assignment One Homework
Online Learning: OL 345 Community Based DRR Training.
Center for Sustainable Development. https://csd-i.org/disaster-risk-reduction-online-drr-training/

This week’s resources:
-Assignment One Discussion
-Magee Example Project Assignment One
-Field Guide: Participatory Capacity and Vulnerability Assessment
-Lesson Plan Template: Participatory Capacity and Vulnerability Assessment
-How to Card: Participatory Capacity and Vulnerability Assessment
-OL 345 examples of general information discovered in the initial PCVA assessment

CARE. Climate Vulnerability and Capacity Analysis Handbook. CARE. https://www.care.org/sites/default/files/documents/CC-2009-CARE_CVCAHandbook.pdf

IFAD. Good Practices in Participatory Mapping, IFAD.
https://www.ifad.org/documents/38714170/39144386/PM_web.pdf/7c1eda69-8205-4c31-8912-3c25d6f90055

IIED. Participatory Learning and Action 54: Mapping for change: practice, technologies and communication, IIED. https://www.iied.org/pla-54-mapping-for-change-practice-technologies-communication

This is an eight week long course. However, if you have sufficient information from an earlier PVCA participatory assessment – you only have six weeks of work to do in order to complete this course.

Assignment One. Identifying Community Disaster Risks, Vulnerabilities and Hazards.
Part 1. Identifying Student Involvement in the First Two Assignments

1. Course Participants who have already conducted a participatory capacity and vulnerability analyses and/or participatory mapping with their communities.
We’re not trying to expand upon your activities list in this course. We’re simply trying to focus our attention on the disaster component of your project and further clarify the most highly critical challenges community members are facing.

Scan the list in the Download Documents Page: “OL 345 examples of information that might be discovered in the initial community PCVA assessment.” This list can help you determine if you already have uncovered the types of challenges in your initial assessments that we will be trying to prioritize over the next couple of assignments.

If you feel that your initial assessments from OL 343 and OL 344 are appropriate you can just mention that in your homework that you send in. This will be a simple week for you! You do not need to send in anything more than that—no lesson plans—no how-to cards.

However, in this assignment, within these challenges, we are looking for the very specific descriptions of the challenges that we are trying to solve.

For example, on the download document “Examples of information from the initial community PCVA assessment”, Where It Says “Beginning 20 years ago, storms have increased and there is flooding now when there didn’t used to be flooding ” what we are really looking for in this assignment is this more specific type of definition:
“The community is located adjacent to a seasonal river which is frequently dry and sandy during the dry season, but which fills with water during the rainy season. Because of deforestation of the watershed behind the village, when it rains, water runs downhill without soaking into the hillsides and over-taxes the riverbed’s carrying capacity—causing flooding of adjacent farm fields and homes. Gullies have formed on the hillsides which direct rainwater more quickly and directly to the streambed thereby bringing floods to the community more quickly and unannounced.”

This is the level of description that were looking for in these first two assignments. Again, let me stress that we’re not looking toward expanding your project or necessarily changing your activities were just looking for greater specificity in the description of the challenge.

If you feel that your assessments did a pretty good job of identifying highly specific disaster related challenges—but only uncovered what you feel is 50% or 75% of what you need for the next two assignments, I would suggest that you sit down and look at the results from your seasonal calendar, your historical timeline, participatory mapping exercise and your vulnerability matrix.

From these assignments that you did in OL 343 and in OL 344, you might find the additional information that you need—either on the sheets themselves or in your notes. If you still sense that you don’t have the information you need, determine if you would like to hold another workshop to try and uncover it—or if perhaps meeting with a few of your committee members might be able to fill in the blanks. Again, we’re not trying to expand your original project—but were trying to identify the very specific top priorities in your community faces. Also, look and see if your community has come up with any solutions to these challenges—coping strategies.

We’re doing this so that you can identify the top challenges and over the next eight weeks explore in potential solutions that you will be able to introduce to the community and provide them with training and capacity building. For example, you might have “set up a search and rescue team” as an activity in your project—but do you actually have the information that you need to go out and begin training? This is we’re going to do it in this course.

2. Course Participants who have not conducted a participatory capacity and vulnerability analyses and/or participatory mapping with their communities.
If you’re joining us from OL 342 and have not yet done these assessments, then these two assignments are perfect for you because they will give you the opportunity of doing them.

I would begin by downloading the CARE. Climate Vulnerability and Capacity Analysis Handbook. It gives simple and very good instructions for leading a six hour workshop that will provide you with the majority of the information that you need. However, I would edit and modify their workshop presentation to focus on DRR rather than on the broader issues which they are analyzing.

Then, you can pick and choose from the field guides, lesson plans, and how-to cards that are available for download and modify them to best fit the context of your community. Then you’ll have everything that you need to lead a workshop in the next 10 days or so. So follow the assignment instructions below in order to become fully prepared for leading a workshop.

So you will need to send in the full assignment which is the actual homework sheet itself modeled after my example, and a lesson plan and how-to card— both of which can be simply modified from the download documents.

Part 2.
Developing a lesson plan and a how-to card for this PVCA workshop.
I would like you to take the lesson plan that I’ve provided you as an example (Download Course Docs), or modify one of your own lesson plans into a lesson plan for facilitating a workshop for identifying vulnerabilities, risks and hazards that farmers in your community are facing.

Scan OL 345 “Examples of general information discovered in the initial community PCVA assessment” to get an idea of the challenges that your farming community may be facing—and design your workshop so that the participants can begin expressing these types of challenges in a more specific way.

Then, I would like for you to hand draw (very simple—no need to spend much time—or feel free to use one of the ones I’ve provided) a how-to card for your workshop,or download my example from Download Clourse Docs, or download one from the Internet, or paste drawings from something you found on the Internet onto your how-to card.

Part 3.
Planning the workshop and touching base with your point person at the community committee
I would begin organizing the workshop itself a week in advance. If you arranged the workshop for the Saturday of next week, then now you really have almost 2 weeks of preparation time.

This would be a good time to also check and make sure that you have all of the supplies and materials that you’re going to need for your workshop—like large sheets of paper, and pens and markers for doing drawings and taking notes. If you’re planning on providing a snack, make sure that that is well organized and that you will have staff or volunteers to prepare and serve the snack so that you can fully concentrate on your participants.

Even though you spoke to your point person at the last committee meeting—it might not hurt to touch base with them one more time to make sure that everything is OK.

Since this will be your first mapping workshop in the community, it would be a good idea, prior to the workshop, to have a tour led by a knowledgeable villager. You may learn some things that you didn’t know, you may have your memory refreshed about things that you did know once, but most importantly the information will be fresh in your mind for when you begin the workshop.

Be sure to take photographs
Put someone in charge of photos. Have them take:
-close-up detailed shots of participants
-close-up detailed shots of the materials that you use
-photos of interesting drawings that you might have done on the newsprint
-shots of the whole group
-a few shots if you facilitating the workshop

The homework to turn in will be:
1. A brief description of the preparation that you have gone through for developing the workshop.
3. A simple lesson plan presenting the skill set in a workshop
4. A simple how-to card

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

See you next week.