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.

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 studnents are posting on our Facebook page, and at our Development Community. Just click on the two links below.

Week 3: Will Your Theory of a Solution Work?
OL 341 Assignment Three CBA Discussion
Magee Example Project OL 341 Assignment Three

Investigating if there is a scientific basis that our proposed theory and activities have worked on other projects.

Suppose that you are a mother whose children are suffering, and an unknown organization came to you with a plan to help your children. Wouldn’t you want that plan to work? Suppose that you are a donor hoping that your donations will fulfill some need. Wouldn’t you want your donations to have an impact? Suppose that you were a local NGO hoping to improve the lives of your people. Wouldn’t you want to be successful?

There is an extraordinarily simple solution to this and that is to do a bit of research to see if any studies have been done about the effectiveness of your proposed activities.

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.