[Workshop] Program / Project Design
Date: December 19th, 2020
Resource Person: Retha Dungga (Indonesia).
Youth in Southeast Asia tend to be restless in moving forward and creating an impact for their communities even in pandemic outbreak. While program design is an essential primary step towards desired successful outcome and impact, not so many young people have the access to knowledge and workshop of program design. The session aims to facilitate participants understand the steps of starting and developing a project and comprehend the logical framework or/and the story of change for designing a program.
KNOWLEDGE & DISCUSSION
The Foundation of Project Design
ABCD: Asset Based Community Development. It’s a principle that is often used by development practitioners. The ABCD model has an approach called Appreciative Inquiry (AI), we use AI to encourage organizational or leadership growth by using positive psychology. Positive psychology means a mindset based on the asset. This approach invites practitioners to move to the same goal. It also encourages us to find solutions with the assets we have.
For example, one of the principles of AI is to create questions that make us progress or learn new things. When we are taking a taxi or motorcycle taxi, for instance, instead of asking "How are the roads today?", we ask “Did you find any alternative path today?”, or "In this week, have there been any unique or exciting passengers?"
Appreciative Inquiry (AI) has 4 phases: Discover, Dream, Design, and Destiny.
- Discover: Identify the assets we currently have.
- Dream: Envisioning of our dreams.
- Design: Using the assets we have identified (discover) to achieve our dreams (dream).
- Destiny: The phase to reach the goal.
Principles of to Consider
SMART (Specific, Measurable, Realistic, Achievable) principle used in the stage "What I can do: Target of Change and Idea".
- Specific: What, Why, Who, Where, and Which regarding the problem. It must be specific so that big ideas can be understood more easily.
- Measurable: the stage where you have to start asking questions to your project: how many, how much, how do we know that is accomplished. Measure the time it takes (or all of them using a benchmark) to achieve a result. And the benchmark to what extent our efforts are considered successful.
- Achievable: Ensuring that the goals can be achieved with the assets we have
- Realistic: Is it worth it? Is it the right thing to do? Is it applicable in the current situation?
- Timely: Determining the time to achieve the target -- short, medium, and long term targets.
Why we design?
We design a project to create more opportunity on long-term goals, otherwise, we can fall into short-term or reactionary activities that don't really solve the problem that we want to address. We should plan our target and activities.
If the project is by our values, we will be more enthusiastic and the project will be more sustainable. So when we wake up we immediately want to work on the project.
- Retha
