Workshop, Program, & Curriculum Design Archives - Page 3 of 6

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.”

The next staff member, building on this aspect of the program design, can say:

“Unfortunately, we recruited more participants than we could accommodate.”

The rest of the game can play out like this:

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24 Jul, 2019

Try This: Find Your Unlikely Allies

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T20:43:06-04:00July 24th, 2019|Categories: Workshop, Program, & Curriculum Design|Tags: Human Centered Design, Try This|0 Comments

It might seem random, but it just might work.

July is Minority Mental Health Month, a time to bring awareness to the importance of achieving mental health and wellness in communities of color, along with addressing barriers that prevent people of color from seeking and remaining in care.

Let’s say you’re an organization interested in developing an awareness campaign related to positive mental health and wellness outcomes in communities of color.

Your organization’s expertise rests on the mental health side, but you identify potential barriers, based on feedback from your program participants, that may become a barrier to someone with a diagnosed or undiagnosed mental health issue staying in care.

When we’re not feeling at our best, many aspects of our lives take a dive. One of which is oral health. We don’t typically connect oral health to mental health, but some mental health conditions like dementia and schizophrenia have increased decay and gum disease as a consequence of bacterial infection rather than erosion, attrition, or abrasion. Also, people experiencing stress or anxiety may also experience higher levels of bruxism (teeth grinding), temporomandibular joint disfunction (TMJ), and gum disease due to life stressors.

Partnering with an oral health organization or your local dentist office to address this may sound like a completely random campaign, but it may be a powerful campaign just off the strength of how random it sounds.

Many nonprofits and community groups like to conduct SWOT analysis. If you’re not familiar with the practice, it’s a strategic way to identify what’s a strength, weakness, opportunity or threat to the organization, both internally and externally. One perceived weakness or threat is recognizing that there are others who have your characteristics, think the way you think, and are “already doing the work”.

That may be true. But how can this move from being a weakness or threat to being a strength or opportunity?

My suggestion: Find your unlikely allies.

An unlikely ally is someone that, on the surface, we don’t think can be connected to our cause, but they may have a particular strength we benefit from once we do a deeper dive into what their skills are and how we can marry them to our own.

While there may be others already doing the work, there’s a specific way you do the work that makes you stand out. Your unique perspective can be the deciding factor on how many people get onboard with your program, strategy or campaign.

Plus, when you think beyond the people and groups closest to you and start to identify the outlier people and groups who have different skillsets that you can benefit from, it brings you to the top.

This activity is ideal for:

Anyone interested in creating a program, strategy campaign or initiative on a larger scale

Here’s what you need:

Sheets of paper or an erasable whiteboard
Post-it notes
Writing utensils (pens, pencils, markers, or dry erase markers)

The steps:

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19 Jun, 2019

Try This: Context vs Content

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T20:39:50-04:00June 19th, 2019|Categories: Workshop, Program, & Curriculum Design|Tags: Facilitation, Try This, Workshops|0 Comments

Like a glass of water, the content of your workshop is contained within the context.

Next week, I’ll be facilitating a presentation and discussion on the reproductive justice framework for a client organization that provides health services to underserved individuals and their families along with partnering with community-based organizations and government agencies.

The client’s project is a learning collaborative that brings together local healthcare providers to adopt best practices for the provision of contraception within primary care, post-abortion, and postpartum settings.

It’s been a while since I’ve presented on RJ for an audience like this, and I’m pretty excited about it. So much so, that it’s reminded me of my goal for creating a Try This blog around the topic of context versus content.

In short, content is what you talk about, while context is how you talk about it.

Think about a glass of water. The content is the water while the glass is the context. Like a glass of water, the content of your workshop (the activities, group discussions, etc.) is contained within the context (or topic of the workshop).

In my case, the content of my presentation is RJ, but I’m presenting the information within the context of clinical and primary care settings.

However, in the client’s case, the participants in the learning collaborative will be looking at how they can provide patient-centered care (content) within the context of RJ.

Another way to look at this consider context within the context (haha) of big-picture thinking. Context is the surrounding atmosphere, the circumstances, perspectives, and intentions that form the foundation of the topic. Content is the activities, details, and events.

This activity is ideal for:

Anyone who has a workshop, presentation or training coming up and you’re tired of throwing together haphazard workshops, presentations and trainings

Here’s what you need:

Sheets of paper or an erasable whiteboard
Writing utensils (pens, pencils, markers, or dry erase markers)

The steps:

Take your preferred writing utensil and either a sheet of paper or erasable whiteboard and create a diagram, like this:

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Your Staff Knows Your Programs Better Than You

Try This: Pivot Your Programs & Services

Try This: Fortunately, Unfortunately

Try This: Find Your Unlikely Allies

Try This: Context ​vs Content

This Is A Custom Widget

Try This: Context vs Content