Office on Violence Against Women
Education and Technical Assistance Grants to End Violence Against Women with Disabilities Program

Year 1: Overview & Timeline

The purpose of the Disability Grant program is to improve systems that are responsible for providing services to survivors of domestic and sexual violence who have disabilities and who are Deaf. This is achieved by conducting three global activities: bringing together key providers within that system; enhancing the coordination of service delivery among those provider agencies; and improving the policies, practices, and knowledge-base of each of those agencies. As a grant recipient of the Disability Grant program, your role is to foster and support these activities in select communities in your service area. 

Year 1: Planning and Development
To ensure your success in these efforts, the first year of this grant is dedicated to planning and development. Specifically, the first year is divided into four phases that you must complete: strengthening your collaboration, identifying your focus, conducting your needs assessment, and developing a strategic plan. These phases are designed to generate the relationships, knowledge, and plan required to successfully change systems for survivors with disabilities and Deaf survivors in Years 2 and 3 of the grant, and beyond. Each phase is described below in detail.

Phase 1: Strengthening Your Collaboration
The first phase of the planning year is designed for you to build and strengthen your collaboration. This includes engaging in the following three activities:

1. Learning about each person on your collaboration, the organization they work for, and the movement(s) that guide their work by creating cross-training opportunities.
2. Identifying the direction of your collaboration’s work together, including its vision for the future and specific mission for how it will achieve that vision during its work on this grant. 
3. Determining how your collaborative will work together during the grant and beyond including how members will make decisions, resolve conflicts, communicate effectively with one another, as well as external stakeholders, etc. 

Deliverable: Collaboration Charter
At the end of Phase 1, you are required to submit a collaboration charter to the Office on Violence Against Women for approval. A collaboration charter is a written document that provides an overview of your collaboration, what it is working towards, and how it will work together to achieve those goals. Your charter must include the following elements:

* Vision statement
* Mission statement
* Values and assumptions
* Glossary of key terms
* Members
* Roles and responsibilities
* Decision making process
* Conflict resolution protocol
* Communications plan (both internal and external)
* Confidentiality protocol
* Work plan

Timeline: Months 0 to 4
It is expected that your collaboration will dedicate the first four months of the first year to strengthening the collaboration. Please note: this timeline is a general estimate. Your collaboration may take slightly less or more time depending on your history of working together prior to receiving this grant and other factors. 

Phase 2: Identifying Your Focus
While you will continue to strengthen your collaboration throughout its existence, after your charter has been approved, you are ready to move to Phase 2: Identifying Your Focus. The Office on Violence Against Women requires you to identify an initial focus at this stage in the first year. Identifying your initial focus will help your collaboration to develop a targeted needs assessment plan that will yield the depth of information required to develop your strategic plan. 

There are three global questions that your collaboration will need to answer during this phase of the planning year:

1. Which communities are you selecting to work with as pilot sites in your state?1
2. Which agencies within your target community/communities are you working with?
3. What type of violence, population of people with disabilities, or aspect of service delivery are you addressing? 

In answering these questions, it is important to consider the expertise, interest, and influence of the collaboration, as well as the interest and commitment levels of potential partners (i.e., communities and agencies). It is also critical to consider which areas have the greatest need and which show the greatest potential for change. It is also essential to consider what is manageable and feasible for your collaboration to take on.

Deliverable: Memo Identifying Your Initial Focus
At the end of Phase 2, you are required to submit a memo to the Office on Violence Against Women in which you must identify your initial area of focus including the community or communities you are proposing to work with, the agencies within those communities that will be the primary recipients of your technical assistance/sites of change, and any specific areas of service delivery that your collaboration has selected to exploring in more depth through the needs assessment. 

Timeline: Months 3˝  to 5˝ 
It is anticipated that your collaboration will spend approximately two months on identifying its initial focus. Please note: this timeline is a general estimate. Collaborations may take more or less time depending on the extent to which you have already narrowed your focus and the strategies you have selected for securing the commitment of pilot sites in your state (if applicable).

Phase 3: Conducting Your Needs Assessment
Phase 3 is focused on conducting a strengths and needs assessment of your community/communities of focus. The goal of this assessment is to collect practical information that will help your collaboration identify key areas of need and develop effective responses, which will be outlined in your strategic plan. Specifically, through this assessment, you should explore the following areas: 

* Experiences of people with disabilities as they relate to accessing and receiving services for domestic and sexual violence;
* Organizational access of programs that serve survivors of domestic and/or sexual violence, including their policies, practices, and knowledge-base as they relate to disability; 
* Organizational responsiveness of programs that serve people with disabilities, including their polices, practices, and knowledge-base as they relate to domestic and/or sexual violence; 
* Connections between organizations that serve survivors and those that serve people with disabilities; and 
* Strategies for overcoming barriers and improving system and organization level responses to survivors with disabilities and Deaf survivors. 

As such, it is critical that you engage people with disabilities, staff from programs that serve survivors of domestic and/or sexual violence, and staff from programs that serve people with disabilities in your needs assessment. 

Deliverable(s): Needs Assessment Proposal and Final Report
In Phase 3, you are required to submit two deliverables to the Office on Violence Against Women for approval: a proposal for your needs assessment and a final report documenting your needs assessment findings.

* Needs Assessment Proposal: Through this product, your collaboration will propose how it will conduct its needs assessment. In this proposal, you must outline important elements of your approach including your needs assessment’s purpose, guiding research questions, target audience, method(s) of collecting data, and process and protocol for each method selected. In your protocol, you must detail how your collaboration will address important considerations such as safety, accessibility, recruitment, consent, mandatory reporting, and confidentiality. In addition, you must include your interview/focus group questions, survey tools, consent forms, and recruitment flyers. Please note: you cannot begin conducting your needs assessment until your proposal has been approved by the Office on Violence Against Women. 

* Needs Assessment Final Report: Once you have finished conducting your needs assessment, you are required to submit a report to the Office on Violence Against Women that documents your findings. The report should be written as a stand-alone document so that any outsider can fully understand your needs assessment, including how it fits within your collaborations larger goals and activities. As such, it should include: an overview of your collaboration, the needs assessment design and process, key findings, and the implications of those findings. 

Timeline: Months 5 to 10
It is estimated that your collaborative will spend months five through ten of the first year on planning and implementing your needs assessment. 

Phase 4: Developing a Strategic Plan 
Once your collaboration has completed its needs assessment, it will move into the final phase of the planning year: developing a strategic plan. It is anticipated that through your needs assessment, your collaboration will identify a significant number of needs – too many than what will be feasible to meet during the implementation years of the grant. The goal, therefore, of your strategic planning process is to identify the priority areas that your collaboration will address in Years 2 and 3 of the grant and to plan your responses to each area.

Deliverable(s): A 5-Year Strategic Plan
In Phase 4, you are required to submit a five-year strategic plan to the Office on Violence Against Women for approval. Your strategic must outline in detail your collaboration’s priority areas, key activities, resource needs, and timeline for Years 2 and 3 of this grant, as well as its general activities and plans to continue this work beyond grant funding (i.e., during the final 3 years of the plan). Similar to the needs assessment final report, your strategic plan should be a stand-alone document that can be easily understood by an outside entity. 

1 Not all collaborations will be required to answer this question. Those collaborations that are comprised of local programs may have already identified the geographic area in which they will focus their efforts. However, the question must be answered by collaborations that have not yet identified a geographic area. These collaborations are required to select no more than 2 – 3 communities to work with as pilot sites on this initiative. 
As of November 2007