Capacity Building

1. Capacity Building Agenda for week 4 class 2: 2/5/09

2. Goals for today • Last class we peer reviewed your genre assessment papers. • Hand in papers • Discuss capacity and needs assessment • Considering Data Collection: reviewing our resources • Assign Homework: Chapter 5 of Fieldworking (skim all): using the 5 levels where capacity can be built as well as the types of capital in community assets from Module 5, develop a working set of open and closed questions you would use in an interview of your community organization’s representative.

3. Hand in papers • Please organize your papers and drafts from top to bottom and hand them in: • Final draft on top • Copies of the artifact/genre analyzed • Peer review draft next with reviewer’s comments • Fieldnotes, observations, and other reflections.

4. Capacity Needs Assessments • Capacity Needs Assessments are papers tasked to organizational and governmental representatives to help assess community’s assets and capacities • They’ve moved from deficit-based models to assest-based models. • They’re important and useful in targeting policy, initiatives, resources, and education. • Professional writers who write in the public interest work with these genres/methods a ton.

5. Deficit to Asset

6. Where Capacities Can Be Built • Individual • Team • Organization or institutional • Community • System

7. Individual • Team • Organization or institutional • Community • System Asset Maps system community organization team individual

8. Community Capitals • Community Capitals are crucial to understand when writing for the public interest as we are • What kinds of capitals are present in your organization? • List these and link them to individuals • Consider how these might be helpful in enhancing the shelf-life of your deliverables. • For each kind of capital, write 1-2 questions you may ask someone to get a sense of the available capitals?

9. Methodologies • Capacity needs assessments have various methodologies--we’ve begun drafting some here. What others might we create to be able to write a terrific capacity needs assessment? • We will develop these instruments in the next several classes.

10. Homework • Skim Chapter 5 of Fieldworking (skim all): • using the 5 levels where capacity can be built as well as the types of capital in community assets from Module 5, • develop a working set of open and closed questions you would use in an interview or survey of your community organization’s representative.