Assignment:
The Riggs Health Foundation is a private non-profit 501c(3) grant-making organization, located at Montclair State University in New Jersey. It is committed to supporting programs that are well-planned and logically described to address a health problem that is well-identified and supported by needs assessment data. This semester, the Riggs Foundation will award up to 8 grants of up to $25,000 each to support projects that meet the criteria outlined below. This amount may be the total cost of your project, although it is likely that you will be seeking or using other funds as well.
Over the course of the semester your team will develop portions of a proposal for a health education/health promotion program. This will include several group components and several individual components. Individual components will be handed in separately by each member of the group, although you are free to assist each other with those components (i.e. sharing references and resources and ideas.)
GROUP PROJECT
1. SUMMARY:
A summary that describes the overall program's needs, purpose, and approach (this is a complete, and carefully written version of the summary paragraphs your group wrote -it indicates who you are (i.e. what organization), who you are serving, to do what, how, etc.) It is essentially an abstract or summary of what would be a lengthier proposal to the Riggs Foundation, that we might use on our website or an annual report to describe the many projects we've funded.
2. LOGIC MODEL:
Your clear and carefully constructed logic model lays out the inputs, strategies, outputs or process objectives, short and medium objectives, and long-term objectives/overarching goals. Your clogic model should be created so that program objectives are clearly linked to realization of goals and program strategies are linked to the program objectives. Furthermore, the logic model should be able to stand on its own without the rest of the paper.) Remember that your logic model should have SIX columns or sections: inputs/needs assessment; strategies; outputs (which quantifies exactly how much/ how many, etc of each strategy you will do; immediate outcomes (these are likely to be knowledge, attitudes, skills, intentions of participants and/or of staff or others you may be training); intermediate outcomes (these are your behavior changes and organizational changes); Impact/Goals (these are your large, longer term health status or quality of life goals- the kind I commonly call "world peace", that is, here's what we REALLY want to achieve in the long term, even if our project is just a small part of it.)
3. REFERENCE LIST:
Your reference list should be formatted in APA style (look it up), and includes professional and scholarly sources, such as government documents, scholarly journals, research organizations. This does NOT include webMD, Wikipedia, commercial websites, etc. All of the references that will make up the needs assessment of your individual components should be included on this list, plus anything else that your group used. There should be at least 10-12 references here.
4. Completion of group activities in class (nothing you need to hand in for this part.)
One person in the group should upload these components to Canvas when complete.
INDIVIDUAL PROJECT
1. Participation in group activities in class (if you are absent or not participating, then your individual part of this grade will suffer. If you are participating, then you will get full credit for this component).
2. NEEDS ASSESSMENT:
You are required to find and summarize two scholarly articles from peer reviewed journals:
• One which describes the nature of the problem
• One which describes an approach or approaches to solve the problem, i.e. health promotion interventions to address this problem
The two must be from the peer-reviewed scientific literature (a scholarly journal) or a government website or official government document, for example, data on the prevalence and other facts about cancer from a National Cancer Institute report.
FOR YOUR INDIVIDUAL PROJECT: You must summarize each of the articles, in your own words- do not just re-write the article's "abstract". The information from these articles will serve as an important part of your group's logic model, however, the individual portion requires that YOU demonstrate that you found, read, and understood the articles. Each of your two summaries will be a half to full page.
3. SMART OBJECTIVES:
Your group's logic model will include one or more overarching health status goals, and will also include short and long-term objectives that are written in general terms.
• For the individual section, you will write 5-7 SMART Objectives, that is, objectives written completely and clearly using all the components of SMART.
• Your five objectives must include at least one for each of the following categories:
1) knowledge
2) attitude
3) skill
4) intention
5) behavior
6) organizational and/or policy
REMEMBER that:
• Knowledge is something you KNOW (can identify, describe, state, etc.)
• Attitude is something you FEEL (confidence, self-esteem, self-efficacy, etc.)
• Skill is something you CAN DO (demonstrate, practice, show, etc.)
• Intention is something you PLAN TO DO
• Behavior is something you actually DO
• Organizational or policy is something that happens outside the individual, at the level of the organization, the school, the community, the legislature, etc. (but also note that if you need to educate legislators in order to get a policy passed, or staff in order to change what takes place in an organization, then you might have objectives to increase knowledge, attitudes, intention, or behavior of legislators, staff, etc. By themselves, those are not organizational changes.)
4. PROGRAM PLAN:
The Program Plan is a roadmap of the proposed program. Your individual component will make clear exactly what ACTIVITIES you propose to conduct, and why you think they will lead to the desired outcomes (i.e. what is the logic or theory behind your thinking.)
• Identify exactly what activities will take place.
• Identify how much of and/or how often your activities will take place (including the "dose" that you hope any given individual will receive. So for example, you may be offering 15 workshops, with an assumption that each student attends at least 10 of them).
• Identify how you will recruit or find the people to participate in the activities (that is, who are you reaching and how will you reach them?)
Remember that saying you'll "give assemblies" and "use flyers to get people to come" is NOT a program plan. Think about what it means to actually engage people in your program and get them to attend. Your program plan section should take about 1, to no more than, 2 pages.
5. EVALUATION PLAN:
The Evaluation Plan describes how you will determine if/that the program has met its stated objectives, that is, did you do what you set out to do, and how will you know that? In real life, this section would vary considerably, depending on the type of funder. Corporate foundations generally prefer the bulk of their funding be dedicated to program services, rather than evaluation, whereas philanthropic foundations vary considerably and some have great interest in evaluation. Government service grants generally require evaluation, but again focus resources more intensively on service provision. Government research proposals, as well as privately funded research proposals, must have a rigorous evaluation section.
For section, you should focus on how you plan to demonstrate to the Riggs Foundation that your program is meeting the objectives you've laid out. It will include the following things:
• What type of evaluation design will you use? (experimental, quasi-experimental, non-experimental). Include explanations like: will you have a pre- and post-test, or follow-up measurements later? Will you have a comparison group or use random assignment to the interventions?
• Who will you gather data from? Who and WHAT are you measuring? (self-reports, blood tests, observations, etc.)
• Provide a sample set of questions that you would use on a survey to measure the outcomes that you identified in YOUR smart objectives, that is, WHAT will you actually want to know/ask to show that you met your objectives?
This section will be up to one page, plus the sample evaluation questions.
6. BUDGET:
What will you use your $25,000 for? That is, what will it actually cost in terms of people, resources, materials, space, recruitment costs, etc. to do this project? How much of that will my $25,000 buy? If the answer is "not much", then where are the other resources coming from? Remember that the Riggs Foundation is providing $25,000 PLUS $2500 for evaluation- that is, you don't have to find money for the evaluation parts. But your organization might be providing other in-kind services or resources for the program.