OL 241 Indigenous Assignment Five Discussion

Online Learning. OL 241 How to Write an Indigenous Climate Action Plan: https://csd-i.org/climate-change/indigenous-climate-action-plan/

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

This week’s resources:

Assignment Five Homework

Magee Example Project Assignment Five

Assignment 4.

Asking for feedback on the Climate Action Plan from your community
Assessing your organization’s expertise for managing the plan’s activities.
Make an appointment with a donor for next week.

By now your project is beginning to take shape.

This pair of climate change courses, 241 and 242, are for writing a draft of a climate action plan for approval by your community and for initial donor discussions.

One section of the finished plan will detail the activities that the plan will use as solutions to the community’s climate challenges. When the plan is completed and approved, you and the community will launch the new program/project to implement the activities in the plan.

This week, we will reengage with the community to get feedback now while the plan is still being written over the next couple of months. Doing this now will:

keep the community engaged in the process while you finish writing the plan
allow them to see up close the challenges and solutions
continue building community ownership of the plan and the future project

Assignment Four has two parts.

Part One. You last saw your community a month ago after completing the participatory needs assessment. Although they had an idea of what kind of plan you might be developing, your plan 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 plan has evolved and to get their feedback before you invest more time in it.

Meeting with the community at this stage will let you see if you’ve accidentally misunderstood something about their needs and challenges. But it also has a larger purpose, and that is that as you are seeking their comments, community members are beginning to feel a sense of increasing ownership of the project. They will perceive this not as an outsider presenting a canned plan 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 plan. If they like what they see as the plan evolves, and truly feel that it was based upon their ideas, they are going to protect and take care of the outcomes long after your nonprofit is gone.

Part Two. Part ttwo 3 of this assignment is to make a list of aspects of your project activities where you and your nonprofit have no experience nor expertise. This course is all about “What solutions work for a changing climate?” So we want to make sure that each activity has someone in charge who has the expertise to make it successful — and sustainable.

What expertise do you need to implement your project?
What expertise do you have?
What expertise do you need to acquire?
Where can you get it?

Part 3. Make an appointment with a donor for next week to get feedback on your project concept.

Okay click on homework for Assignment Five to get started.

Tim Magee