Workshop, Program, & Curriculum Design Archives - Page 3 of 7

8 Mar, 2023

Why Staff Are Struggling with Your Programs

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2023-03-08T10:16:54-05:00March 8th, 2023|Categories: Workshop, Program, & Curriculum Design|Tags: program design, staff capacity|0 Comments

For a long time, I prioritized program participants, because I thought, without participants there would be no program. Now, drawing on the voices of staff (as well as my personal experiences as a staff member), I recognize that there’s a stronger need for balancing the perspectives of both staff and program participants.

As a result, I prioritize speaking directly to staff who oversee the programs I’m evaluating, and they clue me in to three important factors:

How the program is supposed to run
How the program actually runs
How they really feel about the program

Staff play an integral role in the success of your programming. As they experience the day-to-day compared to leadership, staff should be positioned to bring up concerns AND feel supported in the process. Yet, staff voices are often deprioritized to amplify the expectations of funders, program participants, and other stakeholders.

During a recent project, my project partner and I conducted qualitative interviews with community experts to support a foundation’s strategic investments. Using the interviews and a robust literature review, we drafted a field-driven theory of change. After presenting the theory of change to the community experts, we developed a training with foundation staff who were expected to implement the theory of change’s recommended interventions.

Before the training, we administered a pre-training assessment to assess staff’s general understanding of theories of change, and this specific theory of change. We learned:

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23 Mar, 2022

Try This: Reproductive Justice & Program Design

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2022-03-23T13:02:14-04:00March 23rd, 2022|Categories: Workshop, Program, & Curriculum Design|Tags: Monitoring and Evaluation, program design, reproductive justice, Try This|0 Comments

Try this activity, and let me know how it goes for you.

I partnered with a client organization to engage staff and board of directors in understanding the Reproductive Justice framework, and its application to organizational programming and other areas respective areas.

We started with a RJ 101 session in December 2021, followed by a more advanced training for staff in January 2022.

During the January training, each program was presented, and we discussed, using the insights from the RJ 101 training, how each program currently embodies RJ values and principles OR how the program can apply these values and principles.

In comparison to the Reproductive Health and Rights models, Reproductive Justice is an organizing framework, prioritizing intersectionality and the leadership of communities of color and other marginalized identities to challenge and change structural inequities (Forward Together, 2005).

While the RJ framework is easy to understand and more relevant compared to the “pro choice” vs “pro life” debate, strategizing how to apply the framework outside of traditional community organizing contexts can be a challenge.

So, how can your programs prioritize the voices and leadership of the communities your organization supports?

This activity is ideal for:

Anyone responsible for developing programs and services
Anyone responsible for leading and participating in program evaluation activities

Here’s what you need:

Set aside a full day (or several days) for strategizing, where you and your staff can work uninterrupted (as we’re still in a pandemic, determine how this will work for an in-person setting or a virtual setting) Make sure to schedule breaks
Whatever setup you use to capture your process (laptop, pen and paper, whiteboard, etc.) but make sure it’s kept in a place that you can refer back to

The steps:

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12 Jan, 2022

Your Staff Knows Your Programs Better Than You

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2023-03-06T13:59:16-05:00January 12th, 2022|Categories: Workshop, Program, & Curriculum Design|Tags: program design, staff capacity|0 Comments

You know your community better than your funder, and your programs are only successful when staff feel supported and have the capacity to do their jobs.

Your staff knows your programs so much in fact, that when you report to your board of directors or engage new funders, you rely heavily on them to provide details of the nuances of a program that warrants more funding and other forms of support.

As we know, sometimes programs are created in response to a variety of influential factors, including why programs are evaluated. Stakeholder needs (particularly ones with the most power) are a major factor.

One of my first consulting projects was the evaluation of a popular leadership program in New York City. I conducted several site visits to observe the participants and facilitators, administered the program survey and conducted focus groups.

Involving the staff in the evaluation (outside of getting logistic assistance from them) wasn’t on a radar until I started paying attention to their conversations with each other. In particular, conversations around the actual program.

The program’s main location was located in Manhattan, while this program site was in a different borough. I decided to speak more to the staff about their perspectives on this program, its location, and the intricate details that went into running it.

The program’s new site was chosen due to local landscape analysis (wanting to choose an area that didn’t have a program of this kind). This location ran concurrently with the Manhattan location and was chosen to test if the program could be replicated in another borough, provide more community-focused curriculum, and deliver the same level impact for participants living in this borough in comparison to the Manhattan site (which had participants from all five boroughs).

While participants enjoyed having the program in their community (it allowed them to travel less, plus they were able to connect more with local borough residents), what I got from the conversations with staff was that they were frustrated. It had been difficult engaging the local community, from knowing where local resources were from the tiring travel back and forth between all of the sites for this program (including the sites located outside of New York City).

When I brought this up with the executive director, I was informed that a key factor that determined the new site’s location was at the request of a funder, who saw the area as “up and coming” and wanted the organization to capitalize on it.

I knew how problematic this was, and using a landscape analysis as justification was just as problematic. Despite being an external evaluator, I felt that I didn’t have the power to advocate for the staff.

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17 Jun, 2020

Try This: Pivot Your Programs & Services

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T20:51:11-04:00June 17th, 2020|Categories: Workshop, Program, & Curriculum Design|Tags: Human Centered Design, program design, Try This|0 Comments

Try this activity and let me know how it goes.

As the world began to shelter in place to flatten the curve of the coronavirus pandemic, I did what many social workers do: I checked in on my clients to make sure they were ok.

With the exception of one client, all of my client organizations turned their initial attention to orienting their staff to the world of working from home. So, naturally, most of their time was taken up with that.

My one client that was already working remotely before the shelter in place order didn’t have this issue. What they did experience, however, was a drastic shift in their programming.

To use the terminology we’ve been hearing on the news, this client (like all of my clients) had to figure out what was “essential” and what wasn’t in terms of how implementing their programs impacted staff capacity to support their program participants, many who support communities heavily impacted by COVID-19.

Putting on my social worker hat, we discussed how this organization makes decisions under normal circumstances given the work they do (abortion access and advocacy). What’s normal for them is operating with the understanding that anything (from policy introductions that can restrict abortion access, to cyberattacks and general anti-abortion rhetoric) can occur to undermine how they support their members.

So, in many ways, they’re used to being nimble. Trying to do this work during a pandemic is another experience entirely.

We talked about how this nimbleness can be applied to how they’re thinking about their programs under the pandemic. One process we’ve implemented over a year ago was the creation of an evaluation working group consisting of staff members from most of their departments who have a willingness and desire to add more intentionality in their program development, data gathering, and sense-making via evaluation. One first meeting as a group grounded the groups’ expectations as well as introduced the process of evaluative thinking.

Given that this client’s focus with me as been on evaluation capacity building, not much changed on my end in terms of still being able to engage staff, but as with all evaluations, I had to pivot the project to address this client’s emerging need: supporting their member base. The client informed me that they had to make quick decisions on which programs can still operate. If their programming could no longer operate as intended, 1) what can they learn from this, 2) how can they pivot programs deem essential to their work, 3) what qualifies a program as “non-essential”, and 4) how can they make a “non-essential” program more “essential” in the future?

I once had a supervisor that would tell staff, “Your Plan B should be as strong as your Plan A.”

I thought he was wrong. If your Plan A is strong enough, there would be no need for a Plan B.

As I move through the pandemic along with my clients, I see that my former supervisor and I were both correct. Your Plan B should be just as strong as your Plan A.

In response to my client’s needs, I created an evaluative thinking activity.

This activity is ideal for:

Anyone responsible for developing, running, and evaluating programs and services
Anyone interested in applying evaluative thinking

Here’s what you need:

Download the Evaluative Thinking Discussion Guide Download

The steps:

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19 Feb, 2020

Try This: Fortunately, Unfortunately

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T20:49:15-04:00February 19th, 2020|Categories: Workshop, Program, & Curriculum Design|Tags: program design, Try This|0 Comments

“Fortunately, Unfortunately” is an improvisational storytelling game used in drama classes, with kids, and in group activities.

The game involves coming up with a plot and building on as the story goes.

It’s also a great way to add some program design and evaluation into your staff meetings.

With “Fortunately, Unfortunately”, we’re using this game to review processes and identify outcomes with our programming. Use this as a rapid-fire method to keep your staff on its feet by quickly identifying what went well, what didn’t go well, and how issues were addressed during the program cycle.

To add in the storytelling element, we’re retelling the program and its activities from start to finish, adding in moments of reflection where things went as planned (“fortunately”), where hiccups occurred (“unfortunately”), and how they were addressed (“fortunately”).

This activity is ideal for:

Anyone responsible for developing, running and evaluating programs and services
Students interested in evaluative thinking

Here’s what you need:

A space large enough to fit in your program staff
A space to write on that’s large enough for everyone to view
Something erasable to write with
Your program’s logic model or curriculum may be useful, too

The steps:

Have a program staff member start off, setting the foundation for the “story”. Here’s an example of how the game can go:

“Fortunately, we were able to recruit the program participants we needed. We outreached to our unusual programming participants, as well as from local schools and other programs.”

Why Staff Are Struggling with Your Programs

Try This: Reproductive Justice & Program Design

Your Staff Knows Your Programs Better Than You

Try This: Pivot Your Programs & Services

Try This: Fortunately, Unfortunately

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