Project planning
- What should a plan contain?
- Involvement in the planning process
- Using your plan
- Welcome To Your Library project plans
What should a plan contain?
Developing a written plan (and setting aside the necessary time for this) is essential to start involving partners and stakeholders in what you aim to do and to obtain funding. A clear plan will:
- provide relevant background to explain what the need or issue is that you want to address
- set out anticipated outcomes or changes that you expect to achieve
- map these into national and local policy contexts
Set out in a format that is easy to read at a glance:
- your specific objectives
- actions you propose to take or services you will provide to meet these
- how they will be delivered
- by when
- by whom
- how you will know whether you have been successful or not.
Involvement in the planning process
Identifying and making contact with key stakeholders is an important part of preparing your plan. Making contact at planning stage:
- will help you find out what is already going on in your area
- ensure your plan adds value to work in progress rather than duplicating existing projects
- open the door for participation in the development of your work from your target audience and from key stakeholders
- help ensure your plan is realistic and achievable.
This approach is not only relevant to working with refugees and asylum seekers. It can be applied to planning any project or programme.
When writing a project plan to develop work with refugees and asylum seekers, you need to do some groundwork before you talk to possible partners. For example:
- make sure you are clear in your own mind about definitions of terms such as refugee and asylum seeker
- use this or other websites to find out what the key online sources are to gather statistics or estimates about how many refugees and asylum seekers are in your area and where they are from, and some background on what their needs are.
Using your plan
You can use a plan in many ways. In the Welcome To Your Library project, we asked the partners to provide feedback on the project planning process. Here is what one of them said:
'It was a good learning curve and people in the service are pleased with the final document produced. The proof of the pudding is that the ... document is very versatile. It has already been used for a bid for more funding from the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund to extend our work with refugees and asylum seekers and information in it is to be included in the training model we are currently developing for library staff.'
Welcome To Your Library project plans
Each of the current Welcome To Your Library partners has produced a project plan. You can also view these plans and other resources from the WTYL resources section of this site.
London Borough of Hillingdon Welcome To Your Library project plan
Leicester City Council Welcome To Your Library project plan
Liverpool City Council Welcome To Your Library project plan
London Borough of Southwark Welcome To Your Library project plan
Tyne & Wear Welcome To Your Library project plan
This plan is the work of a consortium of five library services, comprising councils in Newcastle,Gateshead, North Tyneside, South Tyneside and Sunderland.