Step 2: Create a plan of action with your community

Contents

Use the voice, wisdom and experience of the recipients. - Michael McAfee, Collective Impact specialist

SUGGESTED ACTION

People in your community already have a wide range of strengths and skills. Consider putting together a “map” of your community’s assets to draw on as your literacy work unfolds.
Make it easy for people to be involved, for example, as supporters, champions or members of working groups.
When considering who to involve, ask yourselves: “Who makes things happen round here?” Look beyond the obvious community leaders and seek out people who are active within smaller groups in the community.
Encourage genuinely collaborative community action, while also making it possible for people to be involved in ways that work for them. Some people will be more comfortable working at the local grassroots level, in closer contact with people who want to improve their literacy skills. Others will be more comfortable working at the strategy level, helping to assess the needs across the whole community, planning action, putting together budgets, sourcing funds, and keeping an eye on progress.
Build a wide network. Set up an initial list or database of people who want to be involved and keep adding to it over time.
Make sure that people from different parts of your community feel welcome and confident that their voices are being heard. Check in with them about this from time to time.

Tools to help:

Find out approximately how many people there are in your particular 26TEN Community, for example, the population of your local council area, or the number of people working in your organisation or industry.
Where possible, collect more detailed data on the characteristics of people in your community, for example, age, gender, location, employment status, income level, and culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.
Analyse your data to work out approximately how many people are likely to be interested in improving their literacy skills. Based on state literacy data, this could around 50% of your total adult population.

Tools to help:

Find out what literacy means to people in your community, and what sort of support they think is needed and would work best.
Talk face to face with as many people as possible, either through individual interviews or focus groups. This will give you a depth of information that will be extremely valuable when planning and running literacy programs.
When you’re designing new programs, or adapting existing ones to suit your community, actively involve people who would like to improve their literacy skills.
Identify barriers that might be stopping people seeking help and take action to dismantle them or work around them.
Get to know those people in your community who can engage people who have literacy problems, for example, teachers who meet with parents at school, staff of neighbourhood houses and sporting coaches.
As early as possible, seek out people whose lives are directly affected by low literacy and invite them to get involved. Ask them what they might like to do, or offer them some options, such as:
– telling their story to inspire others
– coming along to a community forum
– being part of a working group
– suggesting ways to connect with different groups.
Help build the community’s collective strength by making it as easy as possible for people with low literacy to be involved. In the process, many will build new skills and also get to enjoy the experience of being able to make a difference for their community.

Tools to help:

Allow a reasonable amount of time to develop a plan suitable for your community (this could take anywhere between 3 and 9 months to do well).
Use the plan to bring together everyone’s mutual efforts. Make sure it provides clear direction, without being either too rigid or too flexible.
Stage the work in your plan so it stays manageable and doesn’t end up feeling overwhelming.
Before putting the plan into action, make sure there is agreement on it within your group.
If you have a lot of volunteers, set up small working groups for specific sections of the plan. Have a member of your lead group manage or at least be closely involved with each one.
Look at examples of plans from other communities, like this one from the Circular Head community under the publications section at www.circularhead.tas.gov.au
Consider drawing on ideas from models for social change like Collective Impact.
If your community is a big one, think about using project management tools to develop your plan, like the templates, guidelines and tips at the Tasmanian Government site www.egovernment.tas.gov.au
Alternatively, you might decide to use a strategic planning approach.

Tools to help:

Initially, gear up for at least 2–3 years and work out what funds you are likely to need.
Factor in research, marketing and promotion costs.
Be creative about raising funds through local efforts, and look for opportunities to combine fundraising with spreading the word about your 26TEN Community.
Get to know what grants are available to help you fund activities. See some examples here:
- Tasmanian government literacy grants http://www.skills.tas.gov.au/
- Tasmanian government grant alert register http://www.dpac.tas.gov.au/
- Tasmanian community fund grants http://www.tascomfund.org/
Look out for grants and other sources of funding from your local council. Check the Local Government of Tasmania website www.lgat.tas.gov.au for a list of all councils, or contact your own directly.

Work out what results you want to measure, based on evidence, what is measurable, and what is meaningful to your community.
Find out what 26TEN is measuring and look to where you can match your measures with theirs.
Set milestones with due dates in your plan and check in regularly to see how well you are going in reaching them.
Over time, use the information you are collecting to see patterns of both progress and delay. Where there are problems or barriers, find solutions and quickly put them into action.
Take the time to mark significant milestones along the way. Involve as many people as possible in celebrating your community’s achievements.