Project PREP - Planning Process

Project Prep - Planning Process
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FRCs participating in the PREP Planning Process are asked to select someone that lives and/or works in the neighborhood to facilitate the planning meetings. Once the facilitators are selected, they go through intense training, based on the work of the Institute for Cultural Affairs and the Fiscal Policy Studies Institute, on how to conduct successful neighborhood meetings and how to select community goals and data indicators to measure those goals. Each FRC participates in four FRC planning team meetings lasting about 2 hours. FRC directors invite parents, neighbors, members of the faith community, community businesses, council members, government officials, school officials, and policemen to attend the meetings. The topics for the four planning meetings are:

Bringing Together FRC Stakeholders
Mapping Assets and Challenges to Determine FRC Priorities
Creating an FRC Vision and Making Commitments
Developing an FRC Action Plan

Bringing Together FRC Stakeholders

The purpose of the first FRC planning team meeting is to identify other stakeholders that should participate on a community planning team. During the first meeting, the concept of PREP is presented to the team. Additional goals for the first meeting include: reviewing FRC geographic boundaries, choosing a meeting time and place and deciding who will invite other stakeholders to the second planning meeting. FRCs often finds it helpful to have the first planning meeting with an existing group, like the FRC Advisory Council or Parent Club.

The second FRC planning meeting involves mapping community assets and community challenges related to each of the following seven United Way Community Outcomes :

Children and Families are Safe
Children and Families are Healthy
Young Children are Ready for School
Youth are Ready to Become Productive Adults
Children are Succeeding in School
Parents are Working
Frail Elderly Live in Supportive Communities

Mapping Assets and Challenges to Determine FRC Priorities

The goal of the second meeting is to determine which of the seven outcomes will generate the most community energy and is the most important to address in the coming year. The planning team determines which two of these outcomes should inform the FRC action plan developed in the next two meetings and be the focus of work in the community during the coming year. This process identifies assets that can help the community and challenges that can hinder the community from achieving the desired outcomes for children, families and elderly living and working in the neighborhood. When mapping the community assets and challenges, team members were asked the following questions:

Community Assets	Community Challenges
What has been tried and been successful? What are examples of strategies that this community has used to achieve the outcome? What strategies could people in this community get excited about? What strategies will work best to achieve the outcome?	What has been tried and failed? What will make it difficult to achieve the outcomes? What strategies would people in the community be concerned about?

Once the group maps assets and challenges, team members suggest data indicators that would be useful in measuring the challenges facing the community as well as the success of initiatives addressing the outcome area. The questions below helped the group identify data indicators:

How can we measure success?
What data will the community care about?
What data will people understand the best?

At the end of the second planning team meeting, members are asked to identify two outcomes that will be the focus of the group's work during the coming year by placing a red dot beside their top priority outcome and a blue dot beside their second priority outcome.

Creating an FRC Vision and Making Commitments

The goal for the third meeting is to write a victory statement and determine team commitments to develop an action plan for the FRC. At the third planning team meeting, HEROS provides FRCs with in-depth information about neighborhood data indicators that link to each of the FRC outcome statements. HEROS gathers data to show the community what happened to the data indicators over the past several years. HEROS provides the community with data overlays for the census tracks around the FRCs, so that the FRCs can see how their community fares in comparison with Davidson County, the State of Tennessee and the Nation. The tasks for the third planning meeting are to:

Review the time frame, results from previous meetings, and best practices.
Develop a victory statement.
Review the current reality.
Make group and individual commitments.
Finalize data indicators.

To develop the victory statement, team members are asked questions to help them envision what would be happening in the community if they were successful in achieving their goals. For example, if the FRC chose the outcome, Children are succeeding in school, they are asked:

If children are succeeding in school,

What would you see happening in the community a year from now?
What would you hear in the community a year from now?
Who will be involved a year from now
What will be different a year from now?

The planning process then brings FRC team members back to the current reality of each FRC, by having team members:

List the strengths of this planning team in implementing the best practices.
List the weaknesses of this planning team in helping the FRC achieve the best practices.
List the benefits of implementing these best practices.
List the dangers of implementing these best practices.

Finally, the FRC team members are asked to write a statement that summarizes the commitment of the group at this point. Then team members are asked to make individual commitments that will help make the team commitment a reality. To guide this discussion, members are asked what can they commit to that would be "do-able" over the next year.

Developing the FRC Action Plan

In the fourth planning team meeting, FRC team members create an action plan. The first step in the action planning process is to review the work of the team thus far, including FRC stakeholders, community assets and challenges, priority outcomes, and the FRC vision and commitment. At the beginning of the meeting, FRCs are provided with the following "Givens:"

Givens

Previous work of the committee
The time frame for action
FRC definitions:

FRC Lead Agency: Agencies taking a leadership role in establishing public and private services to improve the well-being of children, families and elderly in an FRC service area.
FRC Partner Agency: Agencies working collaboratively with FRCs to improve the well being of children, families and the elderly in an FRC service area.
Community Capacity Building Committee: A group of community and government leaders who influence public and private systems beyond the FRCs sphere of influence.

FRC strategies:
- Use existing partners : Use program strategies that address the two priority outcomes chosen during the planning process that existing partners can assume/provide/expand. For example:

Priority outcome: Frail elderly live in supportive communities.
Program strategy: Expand meal home-delivery program from 3 days a week to 5 days a week.
Existing Partner: Senior Citizens, Inc.

Recruit new partners: Program strategies that address the two priority outcomes chosen during the Planning Process and that are beyond current resources/expertise (what is needed and not met by our current services and partners). For example:

Priority outcome: Children are succeeding in school.
Program strategy A: After-school ESL tutoring for immigrant students (K-12).

Program strategy B: Family literacy program that promotes "parents as tutors" role.

Enlist community and government leadership`: Strategies that address the two priority outcomes chosen during the planning process and that involve systems beyond the FRC and Advisory Council's sphere of influence
- Priority outcome: Families and children feel safe at home, in school, and neighborhoods.
- Program strategy A: Neighborhood libraries should be open from 2:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. so that children have a safe place to do homework.
- Program strategy B: Extra police are assigned to the neighborhood.

With the "Givens" as context, FRC team members are asked to brainstorm specific program strategies to impact the two FRC priority outcomes. The facilitator then clusters program strategies so that a limited number (2 or 3) program strategies can be refined and implemented by two or three work groups or task forces convened by the FRC.

After the clusters are identified, FRC team members form small working groups or task forces to create timelines for workgroup actions. The work begins with the identification of a launch events and victory events for the two time periods. The work groups summarizes action steps, in 3 to 7 words, adds the steps to a timeline. For each action step the FRC planning team determines who will take primary responsibility for implementing the program strategies for each working group: the FRC lead agency, the FRC partner agency, or the Community Capacity Building Committee. Once the timeline for each working group is complete, the facilitator solicits suggestions from the entire group about overlapping tasks and opportunities for work groups to work collectively. The final work product becomes the FRC action plan for the year.