Our mission is to improve the lives for the youth who are dropped out, hungry and who are stuck doing illegal activities by mentoring them with personal & professional development, telling them about how staying in school is better, feeding them with food and having less criminal activities within the community.
Vision
We imagine that the youth have more inherent access to information about why they are dropping out of school and why they should stay in school. A community without hunger, a place to sleep, and a community without crimes.
I really want to start helping the community more often through a nonprofit corporation, I really need help setting up a coalition plan and here are the problems we have in a remote community of the Canadian north. They include but not limited to: The youth have nowhere to go so they are starting to do drugs and drink alcohol more often. When they become bored, they tend to be more mischief. Their parents have problems with keeping up with their bills because they do drugs so the kids do not eat often. Some of the youth, mostly boys have to go either house to house in this small town to have a place to sleep as well.
The youth tends to do the following:
Gamble
Do drugs
Drink alcohol
Go hungry
Have nowhere to have fun
Drop out of high-school
Hi Simon,
First, all apologies for the delay in my reply, unfortunately, work and all that. That said, a big welcome to the Community Tool Box (CTB) and Ask an Advisor. Thank you for allowing us the privilege of helping you with your program planning, what I believe is your desire to build a coalition within your community, and then conducting action/strategic planning for the work of the coalition; I hope I have that right. Let me add, on behalf of the CTB, we very much appreciate what your are trying to do for the youth in the Nunavut community! I think the best strategy for us to take is to first get our arms around creating a program plan, then we'll consider in a separate reply coalition building and action/strategic planning. Hopefully that works for you. Before we get down to business let me explain how Ask an Advisor works. The advisor, in this case me, finds resources within the CTB in the form of chapters rich with information, toolkits with nuts and bolts how to get stuff done information with examples, and community stories from people just like you who have done what you want to do, while drawing upon her/his own community building work to help you come up with the answers you're looking for. In short, the advisor provides links to information in the CTB or from elsewhere if necessary, it is then up to you to sort through and determine the information likely to be the most relevant and helpful. If Ihe advisor thinks her/his own experience might be helpful too then that's added into the mix. Make sense?
On to program planning. Although I hate to assume anything, based on your vision and mission it seems like you already have a pretty good handle about what's going on with youth in your community and the severity of the problems you outlined. correct?
Sometimes I find it useful to first provide background material that helps explain other CTB resources:
The first resource that I think will be useful background information is Chapter 1 - Our Model for Community Change and Improvement: https://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/overview/model-for-community-cha.... I suggest paying attention to sections 6, 7, and 9 which offer overarching principles and values in community work, how to work with others collaboratively, and a framework for addressing community problems; these are definitely worth your time.
The second resource, following the first is Chapter 2 - Other Models for Promoting Community Health and Development: https://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/overview/models-for-community-he.... I suggest paying particular attention to sections 1, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 16, and 17 as they offer great examples of framing the work you want to do with the youth in your community; let others be your guide I always say. These sections do cover a bit of everything you asked about so I think it's worth your time to pour through them.
The second set of resources is directly related to program planning, and related topics:
The first program planning resource is Chapter 18 - Deciding Where to Start: https://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/analyze/where-to-start. I suggest paying attention to section 1 which is about designing interventions and section 2 which is about a participatory approach to planning interventions, which I absolutely recommend; if you have time the other two sections will prove useful to you down the road.
The second resource is Chapter 19 - Choosing and Adapting Community Interventions: https://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/analyze/choose-and-adapt-communi.... In this chapter I suggest reading all six sections because sometimes it is more efficient, feasible, and economical to adapt a proven intervention (or proven interventions) for what you want to do rather than coming up with them on your own; those that show up in the CTB have been proven to be effective so I always recommend starting here.
If nothing in Chapter 19 appeals to you, then I offer Toolkit 7 - Developing an Intervention: https://ctb.ku.edu/en/developing-intervention. This toolkit provides you with all the resources necessary to develop your interventions. Do read the main section along with the related resources, and even more important, the examples.
Okay Simon, you've got five resources as a point of departure for program planning, in my next advisor response I'll address coalition building and strategic/action planning. All of this will get you started and definitely moving in the right direction. Hang on, more is on it's way...
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