Video 11: Community-Based Strategy

Community-Based Strategy

This section will provide you with an overview of Community-Based Strategy

To address this element, summarize the section of the community that will be served by this project. Next, describe who was involved in the project’s development, what processes were used to obtain feedback and the input received from the targeted population. Lastly, attach documentation in the appendix of the application so Reviewers have a clear understanding of what took place and who was involved in the planning process.


  • This is video 11 of the 2021 Pre-Application Training Videos developed by the Administration for Native Americans Regional Training and Technical Assistance centers. I'm your trainer today, my name is Drena McIntyre and I'm with the Alaska Region Training and Technical Assistance Center. The Alaska Region Training and Technical Assistance Center offers free training and technical assistance to the 227 tribes and Native nonprofits located in Alaska. You can reach us at www.anaalaska.org or call us at 800-948-3158. This video series will introduce you to the basic concepts for preparing a 2021 ANA grant application to support your community-based project. There are 16 videos in this series, and we recommend that you go through each in sequence. This is video 11 of Pre-Application Training, Community-Based Strategy. Your application needs to document how your community and/or the target population to be served was involved in developing the project. You can show this by taking stakeholder meeting agendas, sign-in sheets, surveys, focus group notes, et cetera. Your application clearly needs to demonstrate that the applicant organization has a connection to the community to be served including the ability to directly work with your project participants and beneficiaries. And the application clearly documents ongoing outreach activities to maintain community awareness throughout the project's implementation. ANA requires governing body documentation. So if you're a tribe, that will be your tribal council, if you're a nonprofit, that would be your nonprofit board. You need to prove that there's more than 51% of your council or board members, representing the community to be served are Native American and members of the community. Categories of representation include, members of federally or state-recognized tribes, persons recognized by members of the eligible Native American community to be served as having a cultural relationship with that community. Persons considered Native Americans or Native American Pacific Islanders. Tribes are not required to submit the Assurance of Community Representation and instead, will submit a Tribal Resolution. Applicants that do not include the Assurance of Community Representation on the Board of Directors documentation will be considered non-responsive and your application will not be considered for competition. For your Assurance of Community Representation, you can use the format that's found in Appendix C of your FOA. And you can see you list your membership of your board of directors. You list the board member's full name, their title or position on the board of directors, and their affiliation or relationship to the category of community representation. And so for example here, you can see that John Clay is the President of the board, and he's an enrolled member of the tribe. Darlene White Eagle is the Vice President and she's married to an enrolled member of the tribe. So that's a cultural relationship. David Long is the treasurer and he's Native Hawaiian. Johnathan Thunder is the secretary and he's Athabasean from XYZ Village, et cetera. So you can see, and then also they have a board member that is a non-Native and they have noted as such. Remember 51% of your board needs to be Native American or affiliated to a Native American community. We wanted to talk with you about virtual community engagement because of COVID-19, it's been very difficult or actually non-existent for some organizations and tribes to be able to talk to their people face-to-face. So talk to us about how you're reaching out to people when you're talking about community engagement and making sure that they have input and involvement in developing your project idea and plan. So, if you're gonna use online surveys, if you're gonna do one-on-one phone interviews, if you hold virtual focus groups or virtual stakeholder meetings via Zoom or Webex describe that for us and put that in this section of your application. for online surveys, avoid simply leading people to the answers that you want them to give. Formulate open-ended questions, avoid yes or no, precisely word your questions, be very objective and consistent in your language. You will get higher return rates with a giveaway contest and share your survey results and findings with the community that you surveyed. For a virtual focus group, keep your group small to four to eight individuals. And participants in your focus group should be representative of the greater community population. You should have one interviewer with one notetaker, deep interview concepts and a group setting. And then you need to quantify the feedback when possible. So prioritize the needs, rate the seriousness of the issues, count experiences, et cetera. And they should talk more than you do as a facilitator or a reviewer. For virtual stakeholder meetings, invite community stakeholders, cultivate active engagement, give them time for introductions to build rapport use a facilitator and have a planning process. Establish ground rules, it's always good to let everybody know that everybody has a right to be heard, et cetera that kind of thing. And the participants develop the list of what's important. Provide ample time for deep discussion. And take active notes, map issues, assets and solutions. To continue the discussion about virtual community engagement, talk about how you're addressing social media. How will your organization conduct outreach and conduct your project online? How can you engage communities where they are at? In your community-based strategy, think about how your organization has or will conduct outreach and conduct business online and in-person. Everybody's heard about Zoom now, Facebook, GoToMeeting, but here in some of the rural places in Alaska, some folks are still using handheld radios, VHF, cell phones to reach out to people, talk about them in your community-based strategy if that's what you use to get the word out to folks or to hear their opinion on something. In your community-based strategy, describe the community to be served by your project. Describe how the community to be served provided feedback or input during project development. Including your longterm community goal, your current community condition, project goal and design. What process was used to get their feedback, who was involved? Attach documentation in the appendix, the meeting minutes, sign-in sheets, summary of surveys and virtual meetings. And you can read more about this on pages 75 and 76 in your Pre-App manual. Here's a great table that you can use, manual page 76. Basically showing evidence of community input. You can talk about the type of project where you went, you reached out to you to talk to people, who was involved, the process you used for involvement, and the documentation which you will attach to your application in your appendices. So, for example, the first one was the Youth Leadership Camp. Youth ages 12 through 17 were surveyed and then they also were listened to at youth committee meetings. They had a blank survey and then a summary of survey results, minutes of their meetings and sign-in sheets to prove up that they listen to these youth. There was a Cultural Practitioner Training. They say who was involved. The process they used was initial community focus groups. And then elder committee meetings. A summary from the focus group, sign-in sheets committee meeting agendas. You see what I'm talking about. And in this case, I'm talking about reaching out on a Water Quality Monitoring Program. The IGap worker, the EPA coordinator, the tribal administrator and council members were involved. Community announcements of mine opening upstream, went out, council meeting attendees were contacted and then planning meetings were held. So flyer and radio announcement scripts are going to be included in your attachments. Specific topic minutes from your council meetings, and meetings from planning meetings. Describe the working history your organization has with your community to be served. Describe past experience with similar project participants and beneficiaries. What were your successes? What were your challenges? How did past experience prepare you to work with the proposed participants and beneficiaries? There is more discussion on this on page 78 of the Pre-App manual. The Pine Creek tribe talks about their connection to the community to be served. They're talking about how they've been operating a weekly farmer's market in their community for more than eight years. And their Co-op is made up of not just farmers and business owners but volunteers who are members of the tribe. And in the past, the Co-op has worked with the same farmers, Future Farmers of America, local 4-H and cultural practitioners to meld traditional growing practices with modern methodology. So you can see that they've had a long-term relationship with these folks. Describe a communication plan that will inform the community of your project's progress. Include a description of the following. What kind of information will you share with the community? What sector of the community will receive the information, who will your target audience be? How will this information be disseminated? Who will be responsible for creating and disseminating the content? And what's the timeframe for completing each of these outreach activities. And you can go to page 80 of the manual for more discussion on this. Page 81 has a table on developing your communication plan. The Pine Creek tribe shows the message or purpose, who the target audience is, what media was used, who is responsible to create it, who is responsible to disseminate it and what the timeframe was. So for example, a message was sent out about the award announcement. We got the ANA grant and talk about the project and what's going to happen in the project. The target audience was community-wide. It was a press release to radio, website and newsletter. The Project Director created this announcement and the communication team distributed it. And it was sent out shortly after the award announcement came out which was starting October 1st. If you had volunteer recruitment, how would you reach out for that? Their social media, newsletter, website. Again, the Project Director and the farmers are responsible for creating it and communication team disseminates. They give you the date of when that would occur. You do quarterly project updates. They give you the dates of when that will happen. Who's responsible, the Project Director, and they're using a newsletter to get the word out on this. And then to announce new pricing for fruit and vegetables. It's community-wide, there's press release to radio, website and newsletter. And the last year of the project starting March, 2022. So you can see, they're doing it in chronological order so you can see, and it's tied or probably lifted directly from their objective work plan. So on page 77 of your manual, you can use this table to outline the narrative for your community-based strategy. Are there different projects you're considering? Can they be combined in your ANA proposal? Define who gives input, how input was gathered and documented. Documentation is really important to ANA to basically prove up that your community was involved in the planning and development of your project plan. The Alaska Region Training and Technical Assistance Center is here to answer any of your questions. We offer 16 hours of free Pre-Application review. If your application is at least 75% complete, you can send it to us and we will look at it for you. We provide tips and resources to help you complete your application. If you want technical assistance on your mostly completed application, you can go to www.ANAalaska.org, click on Technical Assistance at the top of the page, and then click on Request TA and someone will get back to you quickly. You can also call us at 800-948-3158.

Up next

Video 12: Readiness and Implementation Strategy

Readiness and Implementation Strategy

Training episodes

Video 1: Brief Introduction to ANA and New Funding Opportunities
Video 1: Brief Introduction to ANA and New Funding Opportunities
Video 2: How to Build your ANA Application
Video 2: How to Build your ANA Application
Video 3: Long-Term Community Goal
Video 3: Long-Term Community Goal
Video 4: Current Community Condition
Video 4: Current Community Condition
Video 5: Project Goals
Video 5: Project Goals
Video 6: TTIP Objectives
Video 6: TTIP Objectives
Video 7: Outcomes, Indicators, and Outputs
Video 7: Outcomes, Indicators, and Outputs
Video 8: Outcome Tracker & Outcome Tracking Strategy
Video 8: Outcome Tracker & Outcome Tracking Strategy
Video 9: Objective Work Plan
Video 9: Objective Work Plan
Video 10: Budget
Video 10: Budget
Video 11: Community-Based Strategy
Video 11: Community-Based Strategy
Video 12: Readiness and Implementation Strategy
Video 12: Readiness and Implementation Strategy
Video 13: Contingency Plans
Video 13: Contingency Plans
Video 14: Sustainability Plans
Video 14: Sustainability Plans
Video 15: Organizational Capacity
Video 15: Organizational Capacity
Video 16: Submitting the Application to ANA
Video 16: Submitting the Application to ANA