OL 341 Community Based Adaptation 1

Designing CBA Projects with Sustainable Solutions

Course Syllabus

Week 1. Learn to navigate course website, download the week’s documents, and form partnerships.

Week 2 & 3. Read the document on participatory needs assessments and conduct an informal assessment with a few community members to uncover a real challenge. List the needs identified and determine which could be linked to climate change. Organize them into a clearly described challenge—a development challenge that you are going to solve with your project design.

Week 4. We will clarify your project’s challenge, develop a theory of how you plan to solve it, and research 3 adaptation intervention activities that would fulfill the premise of your theory.

Week 5. Research one peer-reviewed paper for each of the three adaptation activities and see if scientists have found evidence that they are effective in solving your project’s challenge. Write a one paragraph summary of the papers’ findings.

Week 6. Share your proposed project concept locally with climate change colleagues to gain feedback and constructive criticism.

Return to the community with your project concept and get their feedback and hopeful buy-in.
Pick one of your evidence-based activities and write a simple one page guide on how a field staff person could implement it.

Week 7. Write a workshop lesson plan for introducing this activity into a community, and then make an illustrated, How-to card to give to community members.

Week 8. Share your project with someone that you would like to sell it to: a donor, your boss, your professor, someone specialized in climate change for feedback.

Lay out your challenge, proposed solution—and the activities that you will implement in launching the project—into a simple matrix that I will supply. This will prepare you for the next course: OL 342 where you will transform your project into something that can formally be presented for funding.

In Summary
From the Ground Up will give you an insight into contemporary methods of developing community-centered, impact-oriented adaptation projects. You will leave the course with practical field tools and develop a range of skills: needs assessments, project design, community workshops, and discovering evidence-based activities. The course is designed to be used as a vehicle for you to develop a real project, in real time, during this course.

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