Course Syllabus

• Week 1 Learn to navigate the course website, download the week’s documents, and form partnerships.
• Week 2 & 3 Clearly identify the community that you hope to query for the needs assessment. 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 organize them into a clearly described challenge—a nonprofit challenge that you are going to solve with your project design. We want this as real as possible.
• Week 4 We will clarify your project’s challenge, develop a theory of how you plan to solve it, and research 3 solution-oriented activities that would fulfill the premise of your theory.
• Week 5 Research one peer-reviewed paper for three of your project’s 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
  
  1. Share your proposed project concept locally with colleagues to gain feedback and constructive criticism.
  2. Return to the community with your project concept and get their feedback and hopeful buy-in.
  3. 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
  
  1. Share your project with someone that you would like to sell it to: a donor, your boss, your professor, someone in the development/nonprofit world for feedback.
  2. Lay out your challenge, proposed solutions, and activities in a simple matrix (logistic framework) that I will supply. This will prepare you for the next course: OL 102 where you will transform your project into a set of management documents that can formally be presented for funding.

If you have a question don’t hesitate to contact us at: Online.Learning@csd-i.org.

Return to OL 201. Designing & Funding Nonprofit Projects.