Strategic Program Development: Creating Effective Community Interventions Aligned with Organizational Goals

Developing an appropriate program design involves a thorough understanding of the community need and the organization’s own strategic objectives. Using the information you gathered on the organization you described in Assignment #1, suggest three program alternatives that you believe would be consistent with the organization’s mission and either expand services to assist more clients or enhance services in some way to improve its effectiveness. Since every program represents a decision among the organization’s leadership and stakeholders, you may wish to utilize a community needs assessment for your community to develop your program ideas and support your rationale for choosing them.

Address the following:

1. State the program hypothesis and describe the “theory of change” for each alternative and discuss how it would help the organization achieve its goals.
2. Identify the criteria you believe most important to decide which alternative would be the best choice, e.g., effectiveness, cost, feasibility.
3. Choose one alternative based on the criteria you selected and provide the evidence to support your choice, e.g., evidenced based practice, client feedback, research studies, cost analysis.
4. Create a logic model to include:
   1. A diagram of the program design
   2. How the alternative you selected would convert resources into program activity
   3. Outputs that produce the change the program is intended to achieve