COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

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PROJECT PROPOSAL GUIDELINES
COMMUNITY SERVICE STUDIES

You are to complete a formal proposal for a potential new project to promote a particular new intervention in community engagement in a specific place and time. Your proposal will be defined by its organizational parameters, rationale and background, objectives and goals, means and methods, and logistical planning and funding requirements. Your proposal ideally is real, viable, practical and ostensibly of use to the groups where you are interning. This is a persuasive document that intends to convince an audience that there is a need for this important work to be done, and that you have a roadmap for how to do it.

The Project is to be clearly relevant to community engagement, and it will be assessed by its ability to create, build, develop, strengthen, correct, illuminate, or transform community engagement in practical and measurable ways. The Proposal is to be typed, double-spaced, using a 12-point font, with one-inch margins, and turned in online in the Project Proposal assignment slot on D2L during Week 10. You may use figures, diagrams, charts, photographs, or other illustrations to make your case, but these are not required, although they may support the content of your argument. Your Project Proposal should be 7-9 pages in length, using a minimum of 10 sources, with a literature review of at least 2 pages.

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Your projects are expected to be quite different from each other, and may include anything from a slight intervention changing one limited aspect of the larger organization where you are interning, to a new internal program, or an entirely unrelated new event, group or action. Regardless of overall length and differences, each document should contain these elements:

Executive Summary: a brief overall summary of the project, highlighting its relevance to
identified problems, and its unique approach to community solutions;

Statement of Problem: a brief description of the particular social problems, political issues,
critical needs, or identified lack in community engagement that this project will address, using relevant scholarly and research sources as evidence as appropriate;

Objectives: what this proposal will solve and how, rendered into a clear list in numbered or
bullet-point form, flexible in length but customarily 3-5 items

Background and Literature Review: a fuller description of the rationale for the project, the
organizations involved, areas of focus, geographic points or region, relevant historical context, and applicable political or scholarly arguments important to understanding your proposal; this section will vary greatly depending on the scope and scale of the project, and use relevant scholarly and popular sources
Means: your proposed actions, programs, procedures, events, in your own words but using
research sources if needed, in narrative form but possibly including a timeline graphic, or illustrations of relations between people involved and expectations and roles among them

Budget: a chart or list of specific costs for each item in your proposal, including wage and labor
costs, material purchases, services, shipping and communications, and other areas

Outcomes: a brief list or set of descriptors to gauge a measure of success of the proposed
project, reflecting your initial objectives but with as many specifics as you can imagine

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

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Final Word: a brief review of the entire project proposal with particular attention to relevance
and worth to our larger society and the world

You may tweak the categories above somewhat for your final submission, assuming that all the elements there are represented somewhere in a clear and organized fashion. We will spend some class time discussing possibilities and you are welcome to share ideas by email or schedule office hours to discuss in more depth. You are encouraged to browse online resources on constructing a project proposal, keeping in mind that most templates reflect either a research project or a business format, which overlap but do not quite correspond to the social, cultural and political realms of community engagement. Still they can be helpful in thinking of how to frame your own ideas:

http://project-proposal.casual.pm/

http://www2.smumn.edu/deptpages/tcwritingcenter/forms_of_writing/proj_prop.php

Ultimately for the purposes of our course you are asked to dream big and imagine that the money, resources and people could be at your disposal. What would you want to make happen? WHAT WOULD BUILD SOCIAL JUSTICE FOR THE COMMUNITIES YOU SERVED? WHAT IS THE COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT YOU THINK THE WORLD NEEDS?