STRATEGIZE
Developing your vision, strategy, and plan.
Having a clear strategy of what you want to achieve is essential to the foundation of any policy development and campaign. Strategy development incorporates community assessments, solutions, and resourcing. Strategy is not linear. You will have to revisit and refind your strategy throughout the process.
ASSESS
Performing community asset mapping and needs assessments.
Intimately knowing your community assets and needs is critical for developing your policy strategy. While needs are often easy to identify, assets and strengths are equally - if not more important. Once the vision and action plan has been developed, identify community strengths ,assets, gaps and growth areas that need development. It is important to understand where gaps may be filled internally or where external partnerships may be critical. For example, do you have legal needs that require hiring a lawyer or communication needs that require the support of communication specialists who can work with your leaders to give voice to the problems and solutions?
CREATE
Craft policy solutions rooted in community analysis and refine your strategy.
Another critical component to develop your policy strategy is defining the solutions that the community wants to rally around. There are three types of solutions:
Solutions that build upon the strengths of the community.
Solutions that support growth and fill gaps.
Solutions that create structural change and lead to transformation.
The solutions that build upon strengths and support growth could be a part of the structural solutions. However, you may also include solutions that call for immediate interventions that are not necessarily structural but attend to a short-term need in order for the community to move forward and dismantle long-term systemic problems. When identifying structural solutions, it is important to use a guiding framework to keep you on task. Read more for a series of strategic questions that can support this work.