The Action Center for Safe Schools/Healthy Students http://www.sshsac.org
Summary:
The Action Center's toolkit contains exercises to help grantees think through concepts and themes of sustainability. The exercises extend to such related skills as negotiation, how to plan meetings, and resource gap analysis. The foundation of the Toolkit is the Adelman/Taylor model of sustainability, which the Action Center adapted for the Safe Schools program.
Leadership for Change:
Tools for leaders include a participatory activity to build a vision based on a shared understanding of needs and resources; and a set of surveys to assess school/community partnerships, student support services, family involvement, and crisis services.
Strategic Planning:
The Center offers planning tools for resource gap analysis, how to create readiness for systemic change, establishing an infrastructure and action plan, and identifying common barriers to sustainability and how to overcome them.
Partnerships/Collaboration:
The toolkit contains activities to help mobilize support among key stakeholders. Outcomes include finding highly visible and respected champions - leaders from the school district and the community who will support your efforts - and building partnerships around shared goals.
Capacity Building:
The toolkit provides a model of infrastructure elements that support change, e.g., a steering mechanism, change agents, mentors, and coaches.
Communications/Marketing:
The materials introduce school and community partners to the core concepts of social marketing as it applies to building stakeholder support for a program.
Public Policy:
Policy can be assessed through resource gap analysis and surveys (described above in Leadership for Change); it is also linked to the model of infrastructure that supports change.
Evaluation:
Evaluation results can be used to make decisions about which program functions should be sustained; surveys described in Leadership for Change also are useful for this purpose.
Financing:
No one funding source will be sufficient to support systemic change. Tools help you consider which approaches might be successful in supporting program functions. Approaches include: integrating = making functions a part of existing activity-no new funds needed; redeploying = taking existing funds away from less valued activity; leveraging = clarifying how current investments can be used to attract additional funds; budgeting = rethinking or enhancing current budget allocations.
