Hello, Veronica,
Thank you for your question! I appreciate your efforts to provide good guidance to the community coalitions with which you contract. Unfortunately, the Community Tool Box (CTB) does not have single “templates” for any of the documents you need.
I have been on both sides of the relationship you describe (i.e., as the program developer / grants manager for a funding agency AND as a coalition’s program evaluator for a grants recipient). With that in mind, I see an important choice you have to make: do you provide a standardized template (which someone in your agency would need to create) for your coalitions to work with? Or do you provide them with the how to guidance so that each coalition can create something that works best for them? There is no wrong answer here, but I think I would lean towards the former solution in which your agency creates templates that you then provide to the coalitions you support. That will reduce the ambiguity for coalitions, and help you synthesize across your grantees in ways that allow for comparative insight.
Within the CTB, I can direct you to some areas to explore “how-to” resources for:
- Work Plans:
- Toolkit 5: https://ctb.ku.edu/en/developing-strategic-and-action-plans and
- Chapter 8, Section 5: https://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/structure/strategic-planning/develop-action-plans/main
- There is a downloadable Action Plan template in the Tools section: https://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/structure/strategic-planning/dev...
- Quarterly Reports and End-of-Year / Annual Reports
- Both Quarterly Reports and End-of-Year / Annual Reports fall in the topics covered in Chapter 40 - Maintaining Quality Performance: https://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/maintain/maintain-quality-perfor...
- To minimize reporting burdens, you might consider just two reports per year: a progress report after 6 months, and an annual report after 12 months. There are alternative oversight mechanisms to requiring reports discussed in Section 4 of Chapter 40: https://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/maintain/maintain-quality-performance/establishing-oversight-mechanisms/main
- By collecting reports from coalitions, you are essentially creating formal reporting processes, which can be a valuable feedback loop within a system. For those writing and reading the documents, reporting can create insight, share information among parties, and hold parties accountable for progress. Across a collection of grantees/coalitions, reporting processes can lead to system-level outcomes such as increased transparency & institutional trust, better goal attainment & community change, and increased sense of collective efficacy. See Section 5 of Chapter 40: https://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/maintain/maintain-quality-perfor...
I know this response does not provide an easy set of “ready-made” or “half-baked” tools you may have hoped for, but with any luck this provides you some next steps in your work supporting community coalitions.
In community,
Sharon Wasco
CTB’s July 2021 Ask An Advisor