MAT-144 Major Assignment 3 Instructions

Please follow these instructions when completing Major Assignment 3. You will be completing a Microsoft Word template and 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 spend 12 weeks implementing a project to provide humanitarian assistance to people in your local community. At that time, you will take a break from work or retirement and spend at least 30 hours per week for 12 weeks engaged in this project. You will be in charge of your own project working directly with people in need, not simply volunteering with an existing organization. In the 5 years between now and the start of the project, you will devise a plan and prepare funding.

Project details in Word

For your project, you will identify a group of local people to assist with a need from the provided list. You will develop a project that has the potential to improve their lives in both the short and long run. Choose one project from the list below to use for Major Assignment 3. The list is organized under different topics to help you find a project that interests you. 

Education

– An afterschool tutoring program

– School supply distribution

– Day camp for kids

– Vocational training

Health Care

– Pop-up clinic for vaccines, general health care, etc.

– Health care awareness program – mental health, nutrition, maternity care, etc.

– Mental health support groups

– Help lines/call centers

Community Improvement 

– Home rehabilitation

– Community safety program

Other Service Projects

– Food distribution

– Clothing distribution

– Companion program for senior citizens

– Homeless assistance

You will contact experts or representatives from local churches, charities, non-governmental and/or governmental organizations to get information about areas of need in your community and/or additional information about what is necessary to run a project like this.

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

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 complete the Microsoft Word template using 1,500 to 3,000 words to explain specifics of your project implementation. For full credit, you must address each point in each section listed. The objective is to demonstrate that you have thought through in detail what it would mean to provide a certain type of assistance. 

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. Be sure to support your claims with evidence.

Here are the sections that you will be completing in the Microsoft Word template:

I) Titles for both the Project and Each Section

1) A title for your write-up, including your name, the date, the course, and your instructor’s name. Your title should capture the essence of your project (e.g., “Tiny Homes for the Homeless in Mendenhall, MS”) 

2) Titles for Each sections – generic ones are provided in the template but most should be adapted to your specific project.

II) Whom will you help?  Instead of this question the actual Write-Up should have a statement of the group you intend to aid.

In this section, you must address the following questions:

1. Where is your local community (city, state/province, and country) in which you will be providing assistance? 

2. Describe the specific group of people in your local community that you will be helping. Why do they need assistance? What is their economic status? What mix of ages and genders are they? Etc. 

3. How will you get the word out to the people you want to help? Why did you choose this approach?

III) What assistance will you provide? Instead of this question the actual Write-Up should have a statement of the type of aid you are offering. 

In this section, you must address the following questions:

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.”) Does the assistance provided change based on age, gender, family grouping, etc.?

2. How and where will you provide the assistance to people in need? 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. 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?

4. 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?

IV) How will you start up and manage your project?

In this section, you must address the following questions:

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. Out of your 12-week timeframe, how many weeks will you need to start up your project before beginning to provide assistance to people in need? What will you need to accomplish during these weeks?

3. 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)?

4. How would you prove to an outside authority (e.g., an auditor) that everything is in place to proceed with your operation? If permits and/or licenses are required, this should be included. If not, you should provide evidence that none are required (e.g., a government website).

5. Will you need volunteers, paid workers, or both? How will you screen personnel? What kinds of skills, special training, licenses, or certification do your personnel need to assist with your project and why?

6. How will you coordinate volunteer efforts, and what will they do? How many volunteers and/or workers do you expect to have?

V) What will you accomplish in the main part of your project?

In this section, you must address the following questions:

1. How many weeks will you spend providing assistance to people in need?

2. How many people in need do you expect to be able to assist, and in what ways? Provide evidence that the personnel and time available are sufficient to achieve this goal.

3. How will you track and document whom you are helping and the process by which you are providing assistance?

VI) How will you wrap up and evaluate your project?

In this section, you must address the following questions:

1. Out of the 12-week time frame, how many weeks will you need to wrap up your project?

2. In those 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? When your assistance is no longer available to the people in need, what additional sources of support can you direct them to? How likely is it that these additional sources will be available to the people you helped?

4. 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?

5. 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?

VII) Ethics and Christian Worldview Analysis

In this section, you must address the following questions:

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?

VIII) Summary and Reflections

In this section, you must address the following questions:

1. Whom did you contact to learn about local needs and/or additional information to run a project in your 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?

IX) References

1. You must support your claims and data with at least three scholarly sources. These can be journal articles or official government websites with data or other relevant information about your local community.

Financial computations in Excel

Separately from your presentation to sponsors (the project details in Word), 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 and must have at least one non-zero entry per category.

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 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 compounding periods 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 (Savings Plan): 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)