OL 241 Assignment Two Homework

Online Learning. OL 241 Writing Your Local Climate Action Plan:

https://csd-i.org/climate-change/climate-change-action-plan-241/

Center for Sustainable Development: https://csd-i.org

This week’s resources:

Download Class Documents:

Assignment Two Discussion

Assignment Two Homework

Magee Example Project Assignment 2

Chapter One. Community Needs Assessments and Project Outline. This is Assignment 1.

ASSIGNMENT 2. THE SIMPLE PROJECT OUTLINE

PART 1

Take the project component that you agreed to work on with the community and write an outline (just exactly like on the Magee Project Example) of:

One or two (maximum 2) challenges.
An underlying cause or two.
Some of the long-term negative impacts that will result from the problem.
A short paragraph (Problem Statement) that is nothing more than the combination of the three things in the simple outline above. The problem statement is not an introduction to a proposal, nor a paragraph of background information. It is simply the problem, the underlying causes and the negative impacts copied and pasted together in order.

I find that annotating these components in red (like in my example) makes it easier for me to combine them into an organized problem statement. The easiest way for you to do this is to open my example template and type right over the top of what I’ve written and make it your own. It is important to maintain the formatting as it flows in the next assignments.

PART 2: INCLUDING A CLIMATE COMPONENT

Since communities frequently don’t connect problems to climate change – or they don’t understand the implications. In this case, I might add a climate change component to the assignment in order to make sure it is included. This is meant to be complementary to the project outline based upon community identified need – not a substitute. So if your outline had one problem, a new CC problem could be a second. If your outline had one underlying cause, a new CC related underlying cause could be a second.

However, we can’t discount the problems that they identified even if they aren’t climate change related: These are important to them and keeping them in the problem outline will ensure community ownership of the project.

Consequently, your simple project outline may be a mix of traditional community problems and solutions combined with climate problems and solutions. This is normal. Please remember to keep your outlined problems to one or two. Follow the Magee Project Example exactly – it is what we are looking for.

The complete Assignment One homework to turn in will be:

A simple project outline of problems/causes/negative impacts of the chosen project idea.
A short paragraph (Problem Statement) that is nothing more than the combination (copy and paste) of the problems/causes/negative impacts. Look at my example to see how simple it is – no embellishments.
Your climate challenge (problem and or/underlying cause) added into project outline if necessary.

Very, Very, Important: We are going to be presenting to you new, cutting-edge ideas in community-centered, sustainable, impact-oriented project design. At the end of the step-by-step process, you will work on in the next 10 assignments you will have a brand-new perspective on this process that you don’t have today – in this second week. You will need to trust our guidance in the early stages.

You may struggle with two challenges in the first two assignments:

1. The first challenge is that some initial projects are too complex. Projects that are too complex are difficult to get funded, difficult to manage successfully, and from the learning experience of this course, their complexity will overshadow your learning experience.

2. The second challenge is project drift; you have a great idea for your project in the first assignment, which changes a little in the second assignment as you creatively think about solutions, and it changes a little bit in the third assignment – and so on – until pretty soon you have a project that is a different project from Assignment One.

You will need to lock in on the project developed in weeks one, two and three as the project that will be used for the entire 12 assignments. Each week, I need to go back and refer to your first and second week assignments throughout the rest of the 12 assignments. If you have changed the project, I lose the ability to keep track of the project’s direction.

The advantage of staying with your original project is two-fold:

One, you will learn the system of refining one single project developed over 12 weekly steps.

Two, the assignments build on each other from one week to the next – so you will be able to refer back to your early assignments to make sure that everything is included in the process. For example, Assignment 6 is an expansion of Assignment 2. Assignment 7 is an expansion of Assignment 6. Assignments 11 and 12 are compilations of the previous 10 assignments.

At the end of the 12 weeks, you will have both a well-designed project and the assignment documents that you will need for an initial donor presentation.

Go to Magee’s Example Project Assignment 2 to see what this could look like.