Step 4: Identify Your Resources - Both
Assets And Needs
Accumulating
resources is an essential part of expanding your options for
action and increasing your ability to move effectively into
taking action. There are a wide variety of resources that
may be helpful to you in planning your mental health promotion
initiative. They include people, facilities, services, material
resources and policies.
What Kinds of
Resources Will You Need?
What resources
are you going to use for your mental health promotion project?
Because your mental health promotion initiative can benefit
from all of the potential resources that are available, it’s
a good idea to be as thorough as possible in making the "wish
list" for your project.
Some resources
may be readily available in your community (more than you
might think), and some you will need to acquire.
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The
Needs Assessment for Community Self-Help had identified
community capacity to provide support (family members
supporting each other, a strong volunteer and community
service tradition) as well as people in need of support.
To
tap into the community support base, facilitators were
needed as catalysts. Community-based service
providers were well-placed to play this role -- to connect
with community networks and to
promote the new initiative among their colleagues.
To
make the project happen, it was essential to secure
the support of the new Community Health
Boards who employed the potential facilitators. The
fact that community development was part
of the boards’ mandate was strongly in the project’s
favour. From the outset, it was hoped that
the boards would see the Helping Skills networks as
a valuable community resource which they
would want to sustain over the long term.
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How Do You Identify
And Secure Resources?
In the
previous chapter, we discussed several ways of assessing the
resources that are already present in your community. In the
next chapter we will take a closer look at how to go about
acquiring the resources you will need to support your project.
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Step 5: Create
A Plan For Evaluation >
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