Final Project

For your Final Project, you will apply the skills and approaches to program design and evaluation for human services programs to the homeless population in your community. If you are fortunate enough to live in a community where there is not a pressing homelessness problem, then select a community in a major city near your community, or one with which you are familiar.

First, throughout the course you address the issue of homelessness by analyzing a single case study in your Discussions and Assignments:

• In the Week 1 Discussion, you describe the motivation for the program in the case study and examine whether the program meets the needs of clients.
• In the Week 2 Discussion, you identify the types of needs of the homeless and explain how the identification of those needs might influence responses to homelessness in the case study.
• In the Week 2 Assignment, you explain how perceptions of the needs of the homeless may be different than their real needs, and also consider why it is important to understand the accurate needs of the population.
• In the Week 3 Assignment, you develop a needs assessment for the case study.
• In the Week 4 Discussion, you consider evaluative tools to measure the effectiveness of human services delivery in the case study.
• In the Week 4 Assignment, you use a “logic model” to develop a program design and evaluation.

While the Discussion Questions and Assignments are not meant to provide you with the content of your Final Project, they are meant to provide you with an opportunity to practice each piece of a successful Program Design and Evaluation Narrative to address the social problem of homelessness in your community. There is no specific template for a Program Design and Evaluation Narrative, but you should use the guidelines below to craft a single document package that addresses all of the elements of program design and evaluation covered in this course.

With this in mind, to successfully complete this Final Project you must:

Reflect on the program design and evaluation concepts and practices discussed throughout the course to complete a Program Design and Evaluation Narrative for the homeless population in your community. You should incorporate the feedback you received from your Instructor on the Assignments to refine and revise your Final Project before submitting it to your Instructor.

As you finalize your Program Design and Evaluation Narrative, please do not cut and paste from each week’s separate components. The Assignment is to write an actual narrative that could potentially serve the homeless population in your specific community. Your narrative should be edited, seamless, and pertain to the homeless population in your community—not that of the case study.

Your Program Design and Evaluation Narrative should include the logic model in chart form. The Final Project should be double spaced and APA formatted, use appropriate grammar and spelling, and include citations from the Learning Resources from the course as well as from your own research for the Final Project. Your Program Design and Evaluation Narrativemust include the following components:

• A description of your community, including background and demographic information on the homeless population in your community
• A description of the currently available human services programs offered for the homeless population in your community
• A description of the needs assessment you would implement to understand the motivations and needs of the homeless population in your community (include questions you might ask as part of this assessment) and to understand the effectiveness of the services offered (if more than one, then select one to use for this project)
• An outline of the data collection procedure you might use
  • Explain whether the answers to the questions you created would elicit quantitative or qualitative results.
  • Explain how the answers to these questions would inform an evaluation of the program.
• The motivations and normative, expressed, perceived, and relative needs of the homeless population in your community (use newspapers written by the homeless where possible)
• A logic model and evaluation strategies to deal with the homelessness problem in your community
• An explanation of the mission, goals, outcomes, and purpose of the program you would implement
• An explanation of how the program you designed would address social change in the community

Note: As you write the narrative, think about how your ideas evolved throughout the course: What have you learned about identifying needs and creating effective programs and program evaluations?  Using your Discussion and Assignment responses as a launching point, your narrative should include the motivations, needs, needs assessment, mission, goals, outcomes, purpose, logic model, and evaluation strategies to deal with the homelessness problem in your community. 

The Final Project will be evaluated according to the indicators in the Final Project and Writing Rubric located in the Course Information area. Be sure that the Final Project is written using APA format.