Please follow these instructions when completing Major Assignment 3. You will be creating a project writeup in Microsoft Word and completing an Excel template for the assignment. Refer to the assignment rubric for details about how the assignment will be scored.

Overview

You have decided that, 5 years from now, you will dedicate 12 weeks of your time to implementing a project to provide humanitarian assistance to people in your local community.  At that time, you will take a break from your work or retirement and spend at least 30 hours per week for 12 weeks engaged in realizing a project that you are designing now and that you will work to plan and fund between now and when you start your project.

Project details in Word

For your project, you will identify a group of local people that you will assist with a need such as housing, health care or nutrition, education or vocational training, safety, mental health, neighborhood cleanup, or a similar project that has the potential to improve their lives in both the short and long run.

You will contact representatives from local churches, charities, non-governmental and/or governmental organizations to get information about areas of need in your community.

For your project, you will provide specifics of what you will achieve and how the success of your project should be measured.

To ensure that your project will succeed in the 12 weeks provided, you will divide your project into two halves, identifying what will be accomplished at the end of each 6-week interval and how it will be clear to outside people that the step has been accomplished successfully.

For the project as a whole, you will also identify the people, resources, and materials needed to provide your service. Your project must include the assistance of other people, either whom you will recruit as volunteers, whom you will pay for expert assistance, or both.

You will provide a detailed write-up in Microsoft Word (2,000 to 4,000 words) with specifics of your project implementation. For full credit, you must address each point in each section. The objective here is to demonstrate that you have thought through in detail what it would mean to provide certain types of assistance. You must provide a separate section in your document for each item, as indicated here.

Although you may cross-reference points between sections, the questions from each section must be answered in that section to get credit for your response. The amount of credit you receive will depend on how thoroughly you have considered your implementation: you should attempt to write so that a reasonable reader would need to ask few or no follow-up questions to clarify your overall objective, people you will help, assistance provided, project management, timeline, assessment procedures, ethics and CWV analysis, and reflections. Write-ups that leave many questions unanswered or with significant gaps will earn less credit.

Here are the separate sections to provide in your write-up:

1. A title for your write-up, including your name, the date, the course and instructor’s name. Your title should capture the essence of your project (e.g., “Tiny Homes for the Homeless in Mendenhall, MS”)
2. Whom will you help? (250 to 500 words)
   1. What characterizes the group? What is their economic status? What mix of ages and genders are they? Etc.
   2. Where do the people live? At a specific location or in various locations? In what part(s) of town?
   3. How will you decide what kind of assistance and how much assistance to provide to whom? For example, does the assistance provided change based on age, gender, family grouping, etc.?
   4. How will you approach people to offer help?
   5. How will you keep track of whom you are helping?
3. What assistance will you provide? (250 to 500 words)
   1. What specific assistance will you bring to the people who need it (goods, services, training, cash assistance, etc.)? (Here, a response like “cash payments of $50 per person per week” is better than “cash payments”)
   2. How and where will you provide the assistance? Will you maintain a location for people to come to? Will you visit people where they are? Will you provide transportation if needed (or if that’s part of your service)? Etc.
   3. What kinds of skills are needed to provide this assistance? What special training or certification (if any) is required?
   4. How will this assistance help people in the short run? That is, how might people be better off immediately because of the assistance you provide?
   5. How will this assistance help people in the long run? That is, how might the assistance you provide have lasting effects, even if it is time-limited?
   6. How will you track and document the process by which you are providing assistance?
4. How will you manage your project? (250 to 500 words)
   1. Where will central operations for your project be? Will you rent a location, look for a donated location, or work in a distributed way (say from people’s houses)?
   2. What documentation will you need to generate and maintain for the project, and how will you ensure the security and confidentiality of that documentation?
   3. How will you coordinate volunteer efforts, and what will volunteers do? How will you screen volunteers? How many volunteers do you expect to have?
5. What will you accomplish in the first half of your project? (250 to 500 words)
   1. What are the starting and ending dates of your project? (These should be 5 years in the future and run for the 12 weeks of your project.)
   2. How many weeks will you need to start up your project before beginning to provide your project assistance? What will you need to accomplish during these weeks? How would you prove to an outside person (e.g., an auditor) that everything is in place to proceed with your program?
   3. In the remaining weeks of the first half of your project, how many people do you expect to be able to assist, and in what ways? Provide evidence that the volunteers and time available are sufficient to achieve this goal.
6. What will you accomplish in the second half of your project? (250 to 500 words)
   1. How many weeks of operations will you have before starting to wrap up your project? During this time, how many additional people do you expect to be able to assist, and in what ways? Again, provide evidence that you have enough people power to achieve your objective here.
   2. In the remaining weeks, what steps will you take to wrap up your project? What records will you retain, and how will you archive those? What steps are required to finalize any location-related expenses?
   3. How will you conclude relationships with people you are assisting? What additional sources of support can you direct them to after your project is complete?
7. How will you evaluate your project? (250 to 500 words)
   1. If you had to determine immediately after the end of your project whether your assistance had helped, how would you do that? What kind of metric or metrics could you use to determine whether a particular individual had been helped? What questions would you need to ask to determine this?
   2. Similarly, how could you determine, 3 months after the end of your project, whether your project assistance was still having an effect? How would you get back in touch with people you had helped? What characteristics of their condition could you measure to determine whether any positive impact from your assistance still remained?
   3. What else might you need to know before your project starts in order to evaluate success after the project ends?
8. An Ethics and Christian Worldview analysis (250 to 500 words), addressing the following:
   1. How does your project demonstrate the Judeo-Islamic-Christian ideal of loving your neighbor as yourself? What other religious and/or ethical principles does your project strive to exemplify or realize?
   2. How are the people you propose to help different from you, and how might you structure your project to help bridge differences and lead to increased mutual understanding and respect?
   3. How does your project further the goal of affording human value and dignity to all people?
9. A summary and reflections section (250 to 500 words), addressing the following:
   1. Whom did you contact to learn about needs in your local community? What input did they provide to direct your investigation?
   2. What other local needs did you consider? What was compelling to you about the one you chose?
   3. For the assistance you plan to provide, what other avenues are there for people to receive that assistance? How likely is it that it will be available to them?
   4. What other factors (legal, political, social, etc.) that were not considered as a part of this presentation might you need to investigate if you were actually to implement a project such as this one?

Financial computations in Excel

Separately from your presentation to sponsors, you will complete calculations in Excel detailing your expected costs, sponsorship and fundraising contributions, and loan details. A template is provided for this part of the assignment, including additional information to assist you.

As part of your financial calculations, you will develop the following:

1. A budget for your project, including personnel, administrative, outreach, and program costs, plus a percentage breakdown of each type of cost and an estimated cost per person that you expect to assist. Budget costs will be in current dollars.
2. A 5-year forward projection of your budget cost, using extrapolation of CPI values from 5 years that you will look up in a table.
3. A 5-year projection of a sponsorship amount; the sponsorship amount will be a given percentage of your 5-year budget projection and will accrue interest at a given APR.
4. A 5-year fundraising total that you expect to raise through monthly donations; the monthly donation amount and APR will be provided.
5. A 5-year loan payment calculation in which you calculate the monthly payment amount required to pay off monthly, over a period of 5 years, the difference between the cost of the project and the sum of your sponsorship and fundraising totals. (The loan would be taken out at the time the project is implemented.)

Financial formulas

The following formulas, given symbolically and in Excel format, may be useful for completing Major Assignment 3:

Compound interest formula: If an initial amount P grows at an annual rate r with n compoundings per year, then the value A of that amount after t years is given by the formula

A = P*(1+r/n)^(n*t)

Future value of periodic payments: If an amount P is contributed at the end of each of n periods per year for t years and the balance earns interest at an annual percentage rate of r, the total amount A accrued after t years is given by

A = P*((1+r/n)^(n*t)-1)/(r/n)

Loan payment formula: The amount PMT that must be paid n times per year for t years to pay off a loan principal amount of P at an APR of r is given by

PMT = P*(r/n)/(1 – (1 + r/n)^(-n*t))

Inflation rate formula: Given an old CPI value at one point and a new CPI value n years later, the n-year inflation rate IR is given by

IR = (new CPI – old CPI)/(old CPI)