Casa de Paz Project | Supporting Latina Women and Children through Recovery

Why Is This Project So Important?

Casa de Paz Project

Casa de Paz is an intentional community supporting the trans-formative journey of recovery for Latina women and their children. It is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that is just starting. The vision is to create a communal living space for multiple Latina women and their children. The women and their children also would have access to a variety of service providers in the form of graduate students living in the same building. Two possible buildings have been identified. Some of the many things that need to take place for this vision to become a reality are board and working group structuring, fundraising, accountancy, promotion, website development, community relations development, building purchase and renovation, pro-gram development, legal services, educational advocacy, and English as a Second Language (ESL) tutoring, among others. While every project has trade-offs, success on this project will be measured more on the creation of a safe environment with needed services than on cost and schedule.

Why Is This Project So Important?

Hundreds of thousands of people are fleeing violence in their home countries. In the United States, many of them come from Latin America. Often, they lack communities for support and integration as they transition from their countries of origin. In addition, many face many obstacles to stability and flourishing. How would you put your life back together if you were a mother fleeing violence in your country of origin, and once in a new country, that same violence continues in your new home? Few spaces offer stability and encouragement in such circumstances, much less cultural sensitivities and professional services to facilitate the transformation to self-sufficiency and success. Casa de Paz/House of Peace is an intentional community that encourages and draws out women’s resilience both by meeting them where they are and providing time and space to heal, recover, and grow. Most shelters for women and children are temporary; the average stay is seven to twelve days. Casa de Paz provides up to six months of stability, community, and professional services to support women’s growth along a continuum of self-sufficiency matrixes. It is a community that recognizes women’s dignity and celebrates each step toward the realization of their gifts as human beings.

Casa de Paz is an ambitious project with several dimensions to it. There is a shelter that provides six-month housing for families, along with professional services to support a process of healing and transformation. There is a support group for women that serves residents and nonresidents alike. The early meetings for Casa de Paz include seeking volunteers to serve on the board and the three main working groups. Then a facilitated meeting is being held to determine the minimal viable product (MVP) to build. This is an open and operating facility. Some of the features that are needed include a director, staff, a building, remodeling the building, funding, a website, programming, and volunteers. Organizational responsibilities also must be defined. An important question is: What can Casa de Paz do quickly without waiting for other things to happen? What are some of the things they need to do concurrently? How many projects can each of the groups (the board and the three working groups) realistically begin right away? Armed with the answers to these questions, each of the probable projects should have an elevator pitch: What is included and why is it important? Then the most critical few projects can be selected, resourced, and chartered. An example of an elevator pitch is: There is a need to acquire a building and there is competition for both buildings under consideration. One building is more attractive than the other as the cost is considerably less although the number of families served would be less. Another elevator pitch is the need for website development. A fledgling website exists, but there are so many communications, fundraising, volunteer soliciting, and other possible uses of the website that early development is attractive. The elevator pitch could answer the following questions:

• Why is enhancing the website so important?
• How can the website help us do other work we desire to perform?
• Where are we now?
• What do we want?

Ambitious Project with Several Dimensions

First, the organizational structure for Casa de Paz is in a separate document. We still need names of individuals who are volunteering for each working group. For this book, we will list names by first name and initial of last name to protect privacy. How do you envision this organization operating? Casa de Paz has a strong ethos of community, rooted in values of human dignity and a recognition that all of us thrive better in an atmosphere of mutual respect and care. Every subset of the community, from board members to staff to volunteers and affiliates to residents, communicates care and respect in their interactions with one another. Other behavioral norms stem from both these values and the vulnerability of the population we serve. Given the need, at times, for the organization to respond rapidly to serious, stressful, even life-threatening situations, board members, working group members, and even volunteers need to maintain confidentiality, think carefully, use discretion, and behave in a trustworthy manner. For each project selected, we will have one person from the board serve as sponsor (product owner) and one person from the respective working group serve as project manager (scrum master). The product owner for multiple products is sometimes referred to as a product manager. This person is Gillian A. The chair of the board and the scrum master for the entire effort is ___. Since Casa de Paz is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, part of the culture is voluntary. One challenge from a project man-agreement perspective is to get people to commit to completing certain work according to schedule when many have other full-time jobs. Helping the project teams make team decisions maybe relatively easy. The pillar of PM Is Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct of responsibility, respect, fairness, and honesty should be very well accepted and valued.

An Agile approach makes the most sense for this project as many of the requirements are poorly understood at the start and many things are changing rapidly such as having two buildings to consider with competition for both such that a third building might need to be found. Also, in Agile, we ask for commitment. If the team cannot commit to the body of work for the iteration, the plan is changed. The commitment is made at the team level at the start of the iteration.

Answer the following questions:

Question 1 – If you were the project manager, what expertise would you like from the sponsor, stakeholders, or core team members to create a milestone schedule with acceptance criteria?  Minimum 250 words.

Question 2 - What would you want to see in a team charter (i.e., rules of engagement) for this development project?  Is this different (Agile environment) than other (Traditional – Suburban Homes) environments?  If so, how is it different?   Minimum 250 words.

Question 3 - List types of decisions that would need to be made and the appropriate person, group, or method for each, for example, individual team member, the collective team, scrum master, and/or product owner. Minimum 250 words.

You will be assessed on content and mechanics.

Content (30 points/question):  The content must be based on the case study materials and reading assignments.  The PMBOK 6e and CPM 4e, along with other reputable resources can be used to supplement the responses through summarizing, paraphrasing and quoting those sources.  

Mechanics (10 points):  Each question response must be at at minimum 250 words.  "Minimum" is that amount typically needed to meet expectations (to earn a "B").  To exceed expectations (to earn an "A"), a deeper discussion is needed. Each reference should be listed at the end of the paper following APA guidelines.  Online blogs are not acceptable references.