Working With And Developing Communities: Help Her Essay For Indigenous Women.

Brief Summary of the Project

Describe about the Article for Working With and Developing Communities.

“Help Her” is a community developmental project. This project is designed in such a way that the members of this project can help the Indigenous women, who are victims with disabilities like, sexual assault and domestic violence. Since many years, due to undeveloped traditional culture and lack of education, the women in this indigenous community are facing sexual assault and domestic violence (Green & Haines, 2015). So, the main target of the domestic violence and sexual assault agencies is to be more responsible towards the needs of these women. It can be achieved through improving easy accessibility with the members of the plan and increasing knowledge among the community people. The aim is to provide the appropriate services to the more disabled women.

The aims of this project can be set after reviewing the Domestic Violence Program Survey in the Indigenous community over five years. This survey provides the data related to accessibility of domestic violence programs and facilities for disabled women and awareness of the necessities, among disabled women. This survey has guided the strategies and objectives of this project plan (Fabricius et al., 2013). This project plan has modified in such a way that it can fetch a great opportunity that can fund the project. The objectives are stated below:

Training will be provided on violence and disability to 75% of volunteers and 90% of targeted domestic violence and sexual assault service provider staff.

Environmental accessibility will be increased by four domestic violence and sexual assault agency offices and two shelters in that community.

Different communication channels like, intake, hotline, printed materials and agency information will be established to increase the accessibility among disabled women in two shelters and four agency offices.

The outreach will be increased to identify the women with disabilities, who are the victim of domestic violence and sexual assault in the community,

“Help Her” project will also provide the legal support to the victim women.

The project members will also emphasise on the victim women to provide them with certain skills so that they can stand for themselves in the future.

The community development workers have to focus on the male members and the elderly people to get help in this project.

Domestic violence and sexual assault are burden on many areas of the social system and it effects the nation development dramatically yet quietly.  It also influence the fortune of the nation in terms of general progress, lost labour, health care, law enforcement in development. These issues are not only restricted to the present generation, but also it reverberates through the community and family into the future. The recent study shows that domestic violence and sexual assault are more frequent in an indigenous community then a white community. These issues are appearing in this community due to many reasons like, oppression, violent family environment, unemployment, financial problems, poor health, lack of education and much more (Hart, 2013). This will also lead to child abuse and child adolescence. The victims are not able to protest due to lack of understanding, fear, stigma, shame, lack of services, etc. A developmental project is very much needed to address these issues. These kinds of project will develop the confidence among the victims to fight against any circumstances. Many organisations can not show the effort to lower down these issues. But through this project, those organisations, especially government organizations take the initiatives. The victims not only get the proper training to deal with the problems but also they can communicate with each other and share their problems through this program. The victims get all type of supports through the project ct. They can empowered themselves through connecting to various cultures and training different skills for the future. The developmental project not only helps those victims but also it involves various educated people in this team. Different research team, government team, local people come together to make the project successful.

Aim(s) of the Project

The main tasks in this project are to help the disabled women through changes, accessibility assessment, coalition building and training. This plan can be achieved in three approaches. They are stated below:

In the first approach, the volunteers and the staff members have to be associated with the Indigenous community to gain skills and knowledge about the disabled women. The members have to communicate in such away so that the women will feel comfortable to share their thoughts. The project coordinator mentors the six hours training (Rhee et al., 2015). Training needs funding for training materials, one support staff and the time of the project coordinator.

In the second approach, the domestic violence and sexual assault agencies and the shelters have to establish in such a way the disabled women can access them easily. To access the side audits a cross disability team can be made up of four women who use the accessibility check list. The project coordinator will create a report based on the auditing report and will guide the agencies to develop an action plan. The primary audit and other related reports and action plans need many months to successful implementation (Munn-Giddings & Winter, 2013). This plan needs funding for materials and travels, project coordinator, cross-disability team of four members.

In the third approach, the communication and information will help to identify the disabled women. Then these women will be sent to domestic violence and sexual assault shelter and agencies. Project staff consists of support staff and project coordinator will develop primary contacts and then will arrange different meetings and gatherings during the whole project completion (Kelly, 2016). This approach includes funding for incidentals and materials, and staffs to arrange the meeting.

Certain changes in the community:

The changes will be made into the policies of those disabled women to use them for their personal settings within the service settings.

The physical environments will be modified within the service setting, like, accessible bathrooms, wider doorways, ramped entrances etc. This will help to increase the utilization.

Different mode of communications and printed materials will be provided to the women so that they can ask for the help in any situation.

Proper victim services will be provided to the disables women.unity disability agencies and collaborative relationships between domestic violence and sexual assault programs will be strengthened.

Objectives:

The main vision of this project is to improve the help service for the disabled women who had experienced sexual assault or domestic violence. The vision statement is “Help Her.”

Why this Project is needed

The essential “what” of this project is to upgrade the referral, identification and access to sexual assault and domestic violence for disable Indigenous women in an underserved group through certain trainings and increasing awareness (Groves & Hinton, 2013). The essential “why” of this project is the disabled women are more prone to be victims of sexual assault and domestic violence and less prone to get help.

Strategies:

Before developing strategies as a part of process for the project, the following targets will be highlighted.

The project will be targeted towards the organisational level.

The project will be targeted to the organizations, staff providing services, and domestic violence or sexual assault agencies and shelters that can refer the disabled women for proper services.

This project will be also targeted towards environmental factors and personal factors. Environmental factors include policies, communication access, and physical access to domestic violence shelters that affect access. Personal factors include the staff’s beliefs and knowledge about the necessity of women with disabilities.

The following strategies will represent the accomplishment of each of the objectives. They correlate to the stated aims and represent the overall mission of the project. The strategies fit into the available opportunities and resources (Schulenkorf, 2012).

Strategy 1: The community will be divided into equal parts. In those parts, six hours of training on violence and disability will be conducted with the volunteers and staff members from domestic violence and sexual assault service agencies.

Strategy 2: Accessibility audits of domestic violence and sexual assault service agency sites will be conducted. The summary report will be developed from these audits and then the recommendations will be made according to the report. This will help each agency to develop an action plan.

Strategy 3: Easily accessible communication channels like hotlines, print materials etc and information will be made. Then summary reports will be developed based on that and the recommendations will be made according to the report. This will help each agency to develop an action plan.

Strategy 4: Meetings and social gathering will be held with the community disability agencies and sexually assault or domestic violence service staffs. This will modify the protocols of identifying disable women and referring them to victim help services.

Activities:

The project planning group will start with the existing work force with a focus on improving the health condition of the disabled women in that community. The leaders of that work force will be associated with the agencies that have brought expertises in disability issues, clinical research, practice, domestic violence and public health during this planning process. To do the project more specifically, the university based research centre will be called to help in this project (Phillips & Pittman, 2014). They will bring the skills related to violence, epidemiology and will assist in developing the evaluation plan. The members will partner with the state coalitions to bring their expertises related to the overall problems of sexual assault services and domestic violence. They will contribute their big thoughts in services after knowing the facts towards the community. Every targeted shelter and agency will bring its unique expertise and perspective to help the women directly that has experienced sexual assault and domestic violence. Finally, the leaders of this project will bring the experts related to quality of life for people with accessibility, disability and the connection between disability and violence. 

Community Work Approach or Model

The project plan is appeared to be transparent and complete. It shows the reflection through emerged opportunities and present work for replication and expansion in the future. The project will be evaluated under different criteria, like, relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, impact, sustainability and success. In first criteria, how much the aims of this project are relevant to the policies and priorities of the donor, recipient and target group will be evaluated. In this project, the aims are relevant to the priorities of the project. In effectiveness, the measurement of attending the goals of the project will be evaluated.  The “Help Her” project is much effective in that way.  Efficiency is measured through quantitative and qualitative outputs as compared to the inputs (Goodwin & Young, 2013). In this project the victims will get various kinds of trainings, skills, supports as outputs without investing anything. So, the project fulfils the efficiency.  The influence of any project is described through its impact. This project has great impact in the society. The sexual assault and domestic violence are major issues in the society. The society will be influenced to a greater extent through conducting this type of project. Sustainability is associated with the beneficial outcomes of the project after its completion. To evaluate this project under sustainability, it can be said that it will be sustainable till certain extent. Success of a project will be measured with the results (Gilberthorpe, 2013). Overall, this project has a huge success. But it is difficult to say the continuation of its success in the future. Above all, during dealing the issues, this project plan has simple flexibility to fit the crisis operation mode of the agencies and allow the changes to appear in the crisis time.

The budget of the project is defined as detailed estimation of all costs, which are required to complete the project. This budget will be drawn with much more detaining than the high level budget which would be developed in the initial stage of the project planning. This budget will be made based on top-down budgeting approach. This decision will be made by the seniors of the team, like project coordinator, the leader of the domestic violence and sexual assault agencies, local government leaders. This management team will estimate an amount as the cost of the project (Stewart & Wild, 2015). Then that amount will be distributed between the project plans. The advantage of this budget plan is that the members will focus on completing the project within the allocated budget. There are two types of costs that concern the project coordinator while creating the budget. These two types of costs are direct costs and indirect costs. In direct cost, the cost will be dedicated to the project and charge will be fixed on the item basis. Examples are: volunteers, consultation fees, training fees, raw materials, licence fees, travelling cost etc. In Indirect costs more than one project will be benefited and a proportion of one project will be charged. These indirect costs are project insurance, general administration, project equipment, project space, telephone charges etc.

Certain changes in the community

Potential funding can be derived from various sources. The main sources are government grants, debt and equity. These alternative financing sources crucial implications on cash flow, overall cost of a project, ultimate claims and liability to project assets and income. Equity is referred to the funding invested by project coordinator. This funding can be provided by internally generated cash, third party investors, government and project coordinator (Kaneene et al., 2013). Equity provides need a return target that is much higher than the interest rate of debt funding. This will compensate the risks taken by project coordinator, as they have claim to assets and income of the project. Debt refers to the funding which will be borrowed from any financial institutions and banks. It has fixed rate of interest and fixed maturity which will be paid on principal. Lenders of the debt funding have the major claim on assets and income of the project. Some examples of debt funding are debt instruments, bonds, subordinate loans, bridge finance, commercial loan etc. Apart from these two types of funding, the families, private organisations, clubs of the community also can help through funding.

The duration of the project “Help Her” is one year. The project will be divided into different parts. According to that the time management will be done. Identification of the women who faced sexually assault and domestic violence, will take three to four months. Communicating with them and making them, comfortable will take two to three months (Banks et al., 2013). Different types of training, skills will be provided to them. It will take four to five months. Then these victims will be kept under observation for one month. Though this project will be completed within one hour, but the members can reach the project team at any point of their needs.

Limitation:

• This “Help Her” project is planned by nongovernmental organisation. So funding is the major limitation here. This project needs lot of costs to implement different ideas, skills, and trainings. But the funding is limited (Council, 2012).

• Second limitation is culture. The indigenous community is culturally restricted. It is not easy to mix up with the victims of the community. Due to different factors like, fear, shyness, the women of this community can not open themselves easily.

• The third limitation is time. Every project has a limited time period. The project will be granted in the condition to complete it with in a fixed time. In this project the goal is very difficult to achieve with in a time period.

Weakness:

The major weakness of this project is successful completion of the project. The goal of the project is to help the disabled women who faced sexual assault and family violence. These are such sensitive issues which are not described by family very often. After showing responses also, it is very difficult to estimate their implementation of the plan in the future (Steinzor et al., 2013). These violence issues again may arise after the completion of the project. This project can not compensate this weakness. This project involves lot of other members like volunteers, agents. So there is a high chance of corruption in the work and finance.

References:

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