OL 341—Community Based Adaptation to Climate Change

This week, we conclude posting samples of our light version of our most popular course: This is the last class in the course. This will allow you to have a little background on what students are posting on our Facebook page, and at our Development Community. Just click on the two links below.

Assignment 6. How will you organize your ideas for presentation to a donor?
OL 341 Assignment Six CBA Discussion
Magee Example Project OL 341 Assignment Six

Sharing your project with a donor.
	This week you will meet with an important person for sharing your project. I hope that you decided to meet with a donor. You can explain that this is an initial project concept on which you are hoping to receive feedback before you continue with its development.

In the meeting they will tell you one of two things:
1. The project concept falls within their goals and that you have some good ideas.
2. The project concept is very interesting, but doesn’t fit within their programming goals.

But they might have an interest in an area that fits another one of your organizational goals. Maybe you presented a health project to them, and you discover they are more focused on agriculture. Maybe your organization also does agricultural projects. Think quickly and say that you have a similar scale project in agriculture—can you return in a week to show it to them?

Ask the donor if they have any special programs or interests in projects that include adaptation or other aspects of climate change. If they do, get the details—and ask them if they would comment on your project’s design from this vantage point too. Their input at this early stage can help you over the next few months frame—or posture—your project for a better chance at funding.

A benefit if you haven’t done this before is to have the opportunity to do it and to experience what a donor appointment is like without putting too much at risk. It’s perfectly reasonable to approach your local donor to say that you have the seed of an idea for a project and that you would just like to get their input on it before you proceed further. It is also perfectly valid to say this is part of a certificate course in project design and management.

Another obvious benefit is to get a different kind of feedback than what you’ve been getting from your co-workers and community members (and me!).

A donor, or your boss, or your professor may all have a different perspective on development projects than your co-workers do. They also have the power to let you proceed or not and so it’s very valuable to understand what their perspective is so that you will better be able to sell it to them when your concept is fully developed.

The Lite Version
Each week, running in parallel with the course, I will be posting a discussion sheet about community-based adaptation, and an example of the week’s homework. This is simply to give you the opportunity of seeing what these courses are like from the student’s perspective & also give you an opportunity to better understand what the students are discussing that week.

This is called the Lite Version, because the full course has a collection of online student resources, expanded discussions about that week’s assignment, and, of course, it has the course leader who works with students in reviewing their assignments and in making suggestions for their projects.

Is providing this information helpful to you? Please let us know your thoughts!

Be sure to visit the CSDi’s Development Community. Join 450 colleagues in sharing resources & collaborating online.

Like us: CSDi Facebook.

Learn how to develop a community centered, impact oriented project.

OL 341—Community Based Adaptation to Climate Change

This week, we continue posting samples of our light version of our most popular course. This will allow you to have a little background on what students are posting on our Facebook page, and at our Development Community. Just click on the two links below.

Assignment 5. How will you transfer the solution to the community?
OL 341 Assignment Five CBA Discussion
Magee Example Project OL 341 Assignment Five

Turning one of your project’s activities into a lesson plan and a take-home, how-to card.
	The concept of sustainability also has implications for your organization. In working with NGOs I’ve discovered that many of them don’t document their activities. This means that next year when they decide to do an activity again, they might not have names and addresses of partners they worked with or background information for the activity, or the specifics of how they conducted the activity.

Over the next eight weeks in this pair of courses you will be building a series of templates. You are designing a specific project and developing the documentation for that project, but this documentation can be used over and over again for different projects and different activities just by making simple modifications to the original template. So be sure to save these examples of your work. They could even come in handy during a job interview or an interview with the donor about a new project; you’ll have examples for them of the quality of work that you’re capable of doing.

So this week we are going to begin developing our first template — a lesson plan for a community workshop. The project you are building is made up of a series of activities—activities that might be launched with a workshop. The Week 1 needs assessment that you did with the community was a workshop and we provided you with a lesson plan for conducting the workshop.

The second part of your assignment for the week is to draw a ‘how-to card’ for your workshop participants to take home. The card should be a simple reminder of the different phases of the workshop. I try not to include words on my cards because so many community members can’t read, and because in the countryside there are so many different languages.  In the field, I will work with a local person to do the drawings because their drawings will be representative of the culture participating in the workshop.

The Lite Version
Each week, running in parallel with the course, I will be posting a discussion sheet about community-based adaptation, and an example of the week’s homework. This is simply to give you the opportunity of seeing what these courses are like from the student’s perspective & also give you an opportunity to better understand what the students are discussing that week.

This is called the Lite Version, because the full course has a collection of online student resources, expanded discussions about that week’s assignment, and, of course, it has the course leader who works with students in reviewing their assignments and in making suggestions for their projects.

Is providing this information helpful to you? Please let us know your thoughts!

Be sure to visit the CSDi’s Development Community. Join 450 colleagues in sharing resources & collaborating online.

Like us: CSDi Facebook.

Learn how to develop a community centered, impact oriented project.

Important news! May Course Enrollment Extended until May 23.
OL 341—Community Based Adaptation to Climate Change

This week, we continue posting samples of our light version of our most popular course. This will allow you to have a little background on what students are posting on our Facebook page, and at our Development Community. Just click on the two links below.

Week 4: Will the community buy into it?
OL 341 Assignment Four CBA Discussion
Magee Example Project OL 341 Assignment Four
Assignment 4 Family Garden Field Guide Example

Asking for feedback from your community, writing a ¾ page field guide on one simple activity, and assessing expertise.

By now your project is beginning to take shape. You last saw your community a month ago after completing the participatory needs assessment. Although they had an idea of what kind of project you might be developing, your project has progressed tremendously since then. It would be a very good idea to return to the community, just for a short meeting, to let them see how the project has evolved before you invest more time in it.

Meeting with the community at this stage will let you see if you’ve accidently designed any cultural taboos into the project. But it also has a larger purpose, and that is that as you are seeking their comments, they are beginning to feel a sense of increasing ownership of the project. They will perceive this not as an outsider presenting a canned project to them, but as someone who’s working on their behalf following their suggestions.

This buy in is absolutely paramount in the long-term sustainability of the outcomes of the project. If they like what they see as the project design evolves, and truly feel that it was based upon their ideas, they are going to protect and take care of the outcomes long after you’re gone.

The second part of your assignment for the week is to pick one extremely simple activity from your Assignment Two project outline and write a step-by-step guide about how to implement this activity.

Part Three of this assignment is to make a list of aspects of your project activities where you and your NGO have no experience nor expertise. This course is all about “What works in development?” So we want to make sure that each activity has someone in charge who has the expertise to make it successful — and sustainable.

The Lite Version
Each week, running in parallel with the course, I will be posting a discussion sheet about community-based adaptation, and an example of the week’s homework. This is simply to give you the opportunity of seeing what these courses are like from the student’s perspective & also give you an opportunity to better understand what the students are discussing that week.

This is called the Lite Version, because the full course has a collection of online student resources, expanded discussions about that week’s assignment, and, of course, it has the course leader who works with students in reviewing their assignments and in making suggestions for their projects.

Is providing this information helpful to you? Please let us know your thoughts!

Be sure to visit the CSDi’s Development Community. Join 450 colleagues in sharing resources & collaborating online.

Like us: CSDi Facebook.

Learn how to develop a community centered, impact oriented project.