Planning Your Project

Introduction

Now that you’ve got a sense of some of the necessary steps in engaging your community and identifying the mental health issue that you want to focus on, you have to move on to the specifics. How do you go from identifying the issue to taking action on that issue? How are you going to make the desired changes happen?

The answer lies in careful planning -- the essential step of figuring out how to get from ‘here’ (where we are now) to ‘there’ (where we’d like to be). In this section we’ll look at some of the key points you need to cover in order to plan a successful mental health promotion initiative in your community.

"Planning is a way to organize actions that will lead to the fulfillment of a goal."
Community Tool Box, Part D

Developing a plan should help you to answer the following three questions:

• What am I trying to achieve?
• What am I going to do?
• How will I know whether I’ve been successful?

Once begun, it is best if the planning process continues through the life of your initiative. It might be helpful to envision the planning process as cyclical, much like the model we presented in the introduction to describe the whole process of promoting mental health in your community. The following planning model (figure 2) can serve as a framework to guide your planning process.

This model, which describes the stages in the planning process, is an elaboration of the planning step of the larger mental health promotion model we presented earlier.

Figure 2:

There are a few key points to note when using the model to help you plan your mental health promotion initiative.

The first point is that the arrows lead you around in a circle. This is because, as you carry out your plan and evaluation, you will probably find things that make you rethink and change your original ideas. For example, once your plan is underway, you may find your objectives are too ambitious and need to be scaled down.

The second point to keep in mind is that this model provides direction and a frame on which to build, but need not be followed exactly. Planning is often not a tidy process. You will be continually reviewing and modifying your plan, and the planning model will simply help to keep you on course.

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Steps In The Planning Process >

Acknowledgements

Developed with the support and help of the Mental Health Promotion Unit of Health Canada.