I’m putting a “Framework for Action” together to serve as a guideline in support of activating and empowering communities to take action. I’ve posted this framework here on GovLoop because I’d appreciate your help to help make it as strong as possible.
The inspiration for putting this together came from my being sick and tired of violence my neighborhood in Jamaica Plain and in the City of Boston. My plan is to leverage the knowledge, skills, and the desire for safety and peace of my neighbors, our partners, and allies to create and execute a neighborhood wide crime prevention and resource outreach and support campaign.
My hope is that the “Framework for Action” will guide us in facilitating a smart, inclusive, and holistic approach to empowering ourselves to thoughtfully understand what and why violence is happening, craft a plan of action given our thoughtful understanding, take the action, and then evaluate our results and the process we took.
I’m also hoping this framework can serve another tool to help us, the GovLoop Community, to activate our communities/stakeholders to effectively and powerfully and deliver on our missions.
Please review and comment with your thoughts and suggestions. I’ll be incorporating feedback through 5:00 pm EDT on Friday, Nov. 5.
Discuss:
- What are the problems and symptoms we are facing?
- What are good aspects of the current system that should be preserved?
- Who are the key stakeholders who must be engaged?
- What are the opportunities and impacts that could be made?
- What are our values and what do we want to achieve and for whom?
- How do we deal with conflicting values?
- What data is available to us that shows what is currently going on?
- Who or what organizations are currently addressing these problems or opportunities?
- What strategies and tactics have been effective at addressing these problems or opportunities?
- What authority is needed and from whom?
- What is our timeframe?
- Are their short, medium, and long term phase components?
- What are our risks?
- What’s in our control vs outside?
- What are we assuming?
- What have we done similar in the past?
- What can we build on?
Plan:
- What are are we going to do?
- What resources do we need to support our action?
- Who is going to support/managing the action we are going to take?
- When are we going to take this action?
- How are we going to record action we took?
- What Key Performance Indicators are we going to track?
- How are we going to acknowledge and reward action and results?
Act:
- Do it.
- Record it.
- Report it.
- Thank.
Evaluate:
- What did we actually get done?
- What did we get done vs. what we planned we do?
- If applicable, did we involve those with authority to do the really important things?
- How did the getting it done go?
- What was the feedback?
- What can we learn?
- What do we recommend we do differently next time?
Kindly reply with your feedback to the following questions:
- If you’ve done something like this before, is there another existing proven framework we should evaluate? If so which one(s)?
- Are we missing anything or should would you remove something? If so which and why?
- Any other questions you think I should be asking or something I should know?
Thank in advance for your help!
When you say “action,” are you talking about mobilizing communities – online and physical?
Andrew for my purposes yes, but I think this can also apply to any action desired. For this I’m more interested in the macro framework than the micro application.
In Boston we’ll be using this coordinate a city wide campaign to address the causes and symptoms of violence on http://jamaicaplain.neighborsforneighbors.org. For DHS, I’ll be using this to help guide to direct working groups on http://ourborder.ning.com.
Forgot to say, this would also be for online and physical communities.
Thanks, Joseph – assumed all of this, but wanted to make clear for readers!
I figured, thanks for helping me out Andrew!
I didn’t quite see an explicit question on timeframe. What is our timeframe? Is this a short-term project? For infinity? Realistically…
What about a question about risk factors. What are our risks? What’s in our control vs outside?
What have we done similar in the past? What can we build on?
Folks, I’ve updated this with your feedback and also clarified and expanded on the my how I plan to apply this framework. Thanks for all your help.