Management

The scenario provides a background of an organization/agency and the results of a needs assessment. From this, you will develop a program to address one identified need. The program cannot be the same or similar to your team’s program. Be creative and come up with a new idea. There are a series of prompts (questions) that will help guide you.

Scenario 1
You are the parks manager for the City of El Mirage. This is a small city in northwest metro phoenix. The agency’s mission is “to promote healthy lifestyles, increase educational attainments, strengthen community image and establish a livable community.” The historically Hispanic population presents a community of strength through its strong social networks and rich family traditions. But the community has grown significantly, quadrupling in the past 4 years with new developments bringing many new families to the small city.

An asset-based community assessment was conducted to identify emerging needs of local residents. The assessment identified a number of challenges the city is facing.

These include: (choose one)

Inadequate recreational programs
Lack of youth supervision and mentoring
Illegal drug use
Poor police presence and response time
Graffiti/vandalism /littering
Better education needed
lack of public transportation
Segregation of old and new neighborhoods
Neglected neighborhoods
Need for senior services

The parks agency has been given a large grant for city-wide program development and implementation. As the park’s manager, you have been given the task to develop a program to address one of these needs that aligns with the park’s mission.

I have attached lecture notes to help guide you, but make sure you know how to create the project and do your research to make sure every task is correctly done and every graph/picture is inserted. Reach out if you have any questions.

ANSWER

Introduction

Illegal drug use is a common and serious community concern requiring thorough attention from the local authorities and the government. Most youths in various communities are faced with this challenge, especially those who are unemployed and live below the poverty line. Several community-based programs have been initiated to help sort out such and similar issues in various parts of the countries; rehabilitation centres have been developed; schools have also taken the sole responsibility of educating the students on the importance of keeping away from substance abuse and lousy company while in their various residential areas. El Mirage city is for this kind of community-based challenge, and several arrests have been made in the past regarding the subject offence. This paper focuses its discussion on a program to help sort out the subject issue based on a grant issued to the City Park’s agency.

The Program

A successful community-based program starts typically from a certain point and requires specific basic steps to achieve the targeted goal. Some of the common steps to follow when developing such programs include determining what is needed, identifying what the organization can do, selecting a project, developing the plan, volunteer recruitment, creating a budget, setting timelines and finally raising the money. In this case, the first three steps and the last one has been sorted out and what is left of the program is to develop the program. Programs based on illegal drug use in the community require deep research with extensive research to ensure all the areas are captured accordingly. All the stakeholders, the residents, the hospital and the local authority must also be involved in the program development.

Recent research shows an increase in drug abuse in El Mirage; the El Mirage police have reported several arrests, most of which are felonies with long-lasting consequences. Some drug cases lead to probations, while some claims are likely to land the offenders in jail or prison. In liaison with the police, the local authority has taken significant initiatives to curb drug abuse in the city. A substantial number of offenders are prosecuted in courts every month as a result of the subject topic. El Mirage Park agency intends to develop a program that will see a significant reduction in the rate of drug abuse. The chart below shows the tentative increase in drug crimes between 2009-2019 in El Mirage city.

Logical Framework of the Program

The logical framework consists of the activities in the program that will lead to immediate results, thereby enhancing the realization of the set goals and objectives. Some of the activities that will lead to the success of the subject program include school sessions, peer/family counselling, drug-free zones and healthcare. School sessions play a very vital role in developing a drug abuse program in a community. As already mentioned, most of the drug abuse victims are teenagers, especially in high schools. Involving the school in developing such a program will ensure that the affected teenage girls and boys get preliminary information on drug/substance abuse dangers. The school/teachers will also share some live scenarios of the effects of drug abuse among the old and the young. School sessions will also allow the teenagers to get vast knowledge and trend on the previously reported drug cases and their general effects on the victims, immediate families, and the community. This will play a key role in developing a successful program that will positively impact the community.

Family/peer counselling sessions are vital in ensuring the required information gets to the right people from a friendly point of view. Getting advice from parents/guardian tends to get home compared to that which passed with a different person. Most teenagers tend to pay more attention to their parents compared to other parties. In this context, parental counselling is considered very effective in educating the youth on drug abuse and its consequences. Studies show that experiences of drug effects within the families are a vital lesson to the immediate family members and other relatives experiencing the same (Rosenberg, 2019). Setting up drug-free zones in various parts of the city will help in reducing the abuse rate. This will ensure the city remains clean, and the number of those abusing drugs will also reduce significantly since most people won’t risk abusing the drugs in public.

Drug-free zones are also crucial in that the agency will track the victims of drug abuse successfully and help them recover from the act. The program will have high rates of success when these areas are restricted. Finally, health care is the critical pillar in sorting out drug issues; optimal health care services are vital in ensuring those already affected by the abuse recover successfully. The healthcare facilities thus play critical roles in ensuring drub abuse programs are successful and achieve the required goals and objectives. Appropriate and readily available healthcare services are vital pillars in securing the lives of the residents and provision of healthcare services targeted towards the recovery of affected victims in the community.

Monitoring and Evaluation Framework

This involves the indicators used to determine the program’s success rate; monitoring and evaluation of the program can be done in several ways. One of the ways used to evaluate the program’s success is by checking the number of police cases reported on drug abuse within a month or even three months. The program will be deemed successful when the number of cases reported in the police station has reduced significantly; this shows that the program helped reduce the number of drug abuse victims (Fernández-Villa et al., 2019). Another mode of monitoring and evaluating the program’s success rate is through checking the admissions in the rehabilitation centre; low rates of admission in the center display success in the program while high admission rates portray a negative success rate of the program.

The third mode of evaluation is through the hospital records on those admission made on illegal drug abuse; hospital records showing high admissions on drug abuse implicates low success rates of the program while low admission rates of illegal drug abuse cases show high success rates of the program. Most youth who are illegal drug addicts/abusers tend to engage in criminal activities like theft and vandalism to get money to satisfy their drug demands. Records of such cases will assist in evaluating and monitoring the success rate of the program.

Workplan

This describes all the errands and activities in the program that will guarantee the success of the plans in place; it shows those responsible for various tasks towards the achievement of the set goals of the program and also the completion dates of the set activities. The primary exercises involved in this program are sensitizing the public, educating the youth, arresting those facilitating/ drug abuse through various media, providing healthcare services to the victims, and creating healthcare facilities to deal specifically with illegal drug abuse. Sensitizing the public on unlawful drug abuse will be done through social media platforms, roadshows and posters; the selected team of experts will champion this to design the required posters and advertisement (Vitellone, 2017). Educating the youth will be done through school sessions and parent/guardian counselling at home. The education and sensitization plan is scheduled to take three months to ensure program continuity.

Arresting those facilitating and enhancing illegal drug abuse will be championed by the police and is a daily errand with a three-month target. The police will ensure minimal illegal drug flow in public by capturing the traffickers and abusers.

References

Fernández-Villa, T., Molina, A. J., Amezcua-Prieto, C., Mateos, R., Cancela, J. M., Delgado-Rodríguez, M., … & Martín, V. (2019). Drug use, family support and related factors in university students. A cross-sectional study based on the uniHcos Project data. Gaceta sanitaria, 33, 141-147.

Rosenberg, M. W. (2019). Healthcare and the City: A North American Perspective. In Handbook of Global Urban Health (pp. 85-96). Routledge.

Vitellone, N. (2017). Social science of the syringe: A sociology of injecting drug use. Routledge.