Community Identification and Assessment
- Leveraging existing relationships and considering strategic priorities, identify a community to be considered for development programming
- Initial community assessment
- Identify and meet with local leaders, institutions, and other key stakeholders
- Inventory existing community assets
- Identify local development priorities, including new community assets and individual assets
- SWOT analysis
- Identify potential external partners
- Project feasibility assessment
- Is Comunidad Connect capable of supporting the identified development priorities?
- Are local commitment, institutions, and leadership strong enough to expect co-investment?
- Are external partners and funding sources available?
- Is a development program feasible given logistical and technical considerations?
- Relationship development
- Build trust with local partners
- Facilitate meetings with local and external partners
- Support local leadership
- Collection of data used in proposal development and evaluation
- Secondary data: Collect existing data from public and private sources
- Primary data: Conduct interviews/focus groups/surveys with key stakeholders
- Identify appropriate household-level asset (e.g. water filter, stove, floor, etc.) for each participating family
- Proposal development
- Share results of data collection and community assessment with community leaders and whole community when appropriate
- Together with community leaders, based on collected data and information, create a statement of work outlining the development priorities, projects and activities, local and external partners, timeline, and budget
- Review statement of work with key partners and staff to obtain feedback
- Identify potential funders
- Update proposal and present to Board of Directors for approval
Secure funding
Implementation Stage
- Staff allocation
- Hire and train local staff
- Assign roles to SCCC staff
- Communicate program launch
- Community orientation and Q&A meetings
- Stakeholder meetings
- PR, Social Media, Website etc.
- Family engagement
- Collect family level information / home visits
- Identify participating families
- Community engagement and co-investment
- Reach consensus on community asset development service projects to be used as co-investment
- Schedule and track community service projects
- Integrate cultural connections by supporting service projects with international volunteers
- Community outreach
- Hold relevant workshops
- Continue to promote the program and Comunidad Connect
- Deliver household level assets (e.g. water filters, improved stoves, latrines)
- Co-investment completion ceremony
- Household asset delivery and installation
- Installation follow-up visit (1 month)
- Conduct monitoring visits at appropriate intervals to ensure proper use and maintenance and to reinforce information from workshops
- Measure and document impact (i.e. # service hours, # local participants and international volunteers, testimonials, etc.)
- Program Assessment
- Post intervention assessment of appropriate impact indicators (e.g. instances of upper respiratory illnesses)
- Change in local commitment / capacity (qualitative)
- Degree of synergy with Cultural Connections, other CC programs, and external alliances
- Degree of interest in additional projects and continued work from internal and external stakeholders
- Quantity and Quality of Community Service Projects
Continuing Community Development
- Identify next project/program with local and external partners that is likely to be a larger investment with direct economic benefit to the community
- Macro community assessment framework following similar strategy as the initial assessment
- Develop statement of work with local leaders and external partners
- Launch project/program for economic development
- Examples
- Business plan development and financial literacy training
- Marketing and improvement of products and services
- Open access to new markets via CC network
- Micro-grants and micro-loans to local producers and service providers
- Creation of employment opportunities
- Evaluation, Documentation
Replication / Expansion