Strategizing
The CPL offers strategic support, producing deliverables that enhance partners’ initiatives and programming. Informed by research and best practices, the CPL produces actionable steps tailored to community partners’ specific needs and goals. CPL team members have supported initiative incubation, developed strategic plans, and conducted program evaluations. Schedule a meeting with Dr. Ryan Lavalley to discuss incubation and strategizing opportunities.
Initiative Incubation
Impact starts with incubation. We offer support from the earliest stages of an initiative, helping to imagine creative solutions and strategically shape ideas. Initiative incubation might be a standalone conversation or an ongoing dialogue. After an initial idea, the CPL team leverages academic partnerships to create evidence-based proposals, strategic plans, and models for an organization’s new initiative.
MSOT Community Practice Course
Each spring semester, CPL Primary Lead Dr. Ryan Lavalley leads a M.S. in Occupational Therapy (MSOT) Community Practice course. Teams of four students are introduced to practice oriented toward community change through an experiential learning opportunity in which they contribute to and/or design a real-world transformative initiative alongside a community partner.
Student teams meet with and engage with local organizations to develop initiatives or resources that support the organizations’ work. Deliverables often include a well developed strategic plan for operationalizing the program, including proposed funding options, and initial materials such a resource packet or brief training for community partners to jumpstart the process.
More information is available on the MSOT Community Practice Course page.
Incubation Meetings
CPL Primary Lead Dr. Ryan Lavalley and other CPL team members meet with individuals and organizations to identify shared needs, conceptualize initiatives, and strategize paths forward.
For example, the City of Raleigh reached out to the CPL to discuss potential development of a home preservation coalition. Ryan and CPL Community Engagement Fellow Leiha Edmonds met with the City to offer idea incubation, informed by their experiences creating and coordinating the Orange County Home Preservation Coalition. In the meeting, a variety of stakeholders across Raleigh came together to brainstorm ideas for the coalition and consider potential avenues for collaboration.
Ryan also meets with community engagement fellows in the Carolina Center for Public Service at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Community engagement fellows develop and implement engagement or engaged scholarship projects that are responsive to community priorities and have an academic connection. Ryan helps the fellows advance their community-based research approaches, discussing strategies for funding community-engaged research and troubleshooting potential roadblocks.
Strategic Planning
In collaboration with organizations and communities, the CPL team develops strategic plans for a variety of organizational goals related to community partnership and engagement. The CPL team contributes an abundance-based approach, building upon existing communal and organizational strengths. The CPL leverages many years of community partnership expertise to assess current resources and identify specific action items to improve meaningful community impact.
Neighborhood Engagement Strategic Plan
The CPL developed a neighborhood engagement strategic plan for Habitat for Humanity of Orange County to more meaningfully engage community members. The plan identified four action areas: increasing Habitat capacity for engagement, facilitating communication among Habitat and community, cultivating cohesion among diverse communities, and reinforcing community leadership and decision-making.
The CPL then detailed specific action items, including:
- Resident Leadership: Support of local resident leadership groups; development of resident leadership coalition
- Staff Capacity: Hiring neighborhood engagement team manager and coordinators and community advocacy specialists
- Competencies and Training: Holistic and critical approach to neighborhood engagement that is rooted in strengths-based approaches, antiracism, cultural responsiveness, and resident leadership
- Neighborhood Engagement: Tailored guidance for staff to engage with communities based on foundational outcomes of community quality of life
- Evaluation: Development of specific evaluation methods to identify formative and summative outcomes for Habitat’s neighborhood engagement process
The CPL continued its work with Habitat to implement this neighborhood engagement approach.
Policy Recommendations
Through research, data collection, and program evaluations, the CPL team not only produces recommendations for organizations and initiatives but also develops public policy recommendations. CPL leads are often approached by organizations and government entities to offer guidance on policies such as accessible housing and home repair programs. Below, we share a few examples of this work.
CPL Primary Lead Dr. Ryan Lavalley and CPL Community Engagement Fellow Leiha Edmonds regularly communicate with Orange County and the Towns of Chapel Hill, Carrboro, and Hillsborough to provide home repair policy recommendations. These recommendations are informed informed by the CPL’s administration of the Orange County Home Preservation Coalition and coordination of the Orange County Affordable Housing Coalition. We have advised on policies including Affordable Housing Development Reserve Funding, Climate Action Tax Expenditure, and Community Development Block Grants.
Avangelyne Padilla, a master’s of public administration student, conducted research and created deliverables to further the Orange County Department on Aging’s goal to create an inclusive county for older adults. Avangelyne compared indicators for inclusive design in the Orange County Department on Aging’s Master Aging Plan with best practices in other jurisdictions, particularly larger cities. Based on these findings, Avangelyne developed specific recommendations to improve accessory dwelling units (ADUs) and affordable home repair programs. Avangelyne then recommended policy changes for zoning and development and identified specific steps needed to implement these recommendations.
Community Center Strategic Planning
The CPL developed a strategic plan to enhance community engagement in a community center in Fairview, is a historically African American neighborhood in Hillsborough, N.C. In 2002, the City of Hillsborough built a dual-purpose building in Fairview meant to function as a police substation and a community center. However, over the years, residents found the building somewhat inaccessible, so its use as a community center declined. After nearly 20 years of advocacy, the building was designated a full-time community center. The Fairview Community Watch (FCW) renamed the building to the Dorothy N. Johnson Community Center after the late Mrs. Dorothy Johnson, a strong advocate of the community.
The CPL partnered with the FCW to collect community oral histories across several months in 2022. The stories and experiences passed on through oral histories will spotlight Fairview’s vibrant history and culture of community. These perspectives informed the community center’s new vision to support participation, intercultural engagement, health-oriented activities, and community cohesion. Informed by community input, the CPL team developed “Vitalize: Dorothy N. Johnson Community Center Strategic Plan.” This plan outlines programming and renovation objectives to enhance community participation and engagement and support a safer, healthier, fairer, and more enjoyable place to live.
Orange County Master Aging Plan Support
CPL Community Engagement Fellow Leiha Edmonds leads the data collection, analysis, and evaluation of Orange County, N.C.’s 2022-2027 Master Aging Plan. She works across the seven domains of age-friendly collaboration—Housing, Health, Civic Engagement, Recreation, Employment, Communication, and Transportation—to support workgroups that bring together local government staff and elected officials, nonprofits, and residents to coordinate and implement a community-informed plan to make the county a more inclusive and age-friendly region.
Program Evaluation
Community support is a cycle that requires dialogue, evaluation, and responsiveness to ensure programs are meeting community members’ needs. The CPL team has evaluated a number of our partners’ programs. We contribute an occupational therapy perspective, mobilizing community members’ everyday experiences of occupation to inform our analysis. We evaluate what works and identify specific actions to improve a program’s efficacy.
OCHPC Program Evaluation
Jen Farris, dual degree Master of City and Regional Planning and Master in Public Health, completed a practicum with the CPL to conduct a program evaluation for the Orange County Home Preservation Coalition (OCHPC) through a racial equity lens. The analysis focused on elderly, low-income, and Black households because these groups are major recipients of Orange County Home Preservation Coalition (OCHPC) services.
Jen incorporated census data, program evaluations from participants, and interviews with partner organizations. The 2023 Orange County Home Preservation Coalition Evaluation Report evaluated successes and challenges of the OCHPC’s home repair program and developed recommendations to enhance the delivery of home preservation services within Orange County.
Master Aging Plan Evaluation
The CPL maintains a longstanding partnership with the Orange County Department on Aging (OCDOA) to support programming and initiatives that help older adults and caregivers meet their social, mental, physical, financial, and day-to-day practical needs. A big part of this work is the OCDOA’s five-year Master Aging Plan. CPL Primary Lead Dr. Ryan Lavalley co-leads the Master Aging Plan Housing Workgroup, and CPL Community Engagement Fellow Leiha Edmonds supports coordination and evaluation of the Master Aging Plan.
LINK Program Evaluation
The CPL developed an evaluation process for the Marian Cheek Jackson Center’s Linking Generations in Northside (LINK) program, which the CPL coordinates. The Jackson Center was seeking to understand LINK’s impact, effectiveness, and areas for growth. The CPL designed and administered surveys and conducted interviews with LINK participants to create data around LINK participants’ experiences. The Jackson Center is using this data to inform the next cohort of LINK.
Evaluating the LINK program also helps the Jackson Center tell its story effectively to potential donors and service partners. The program evaluation showed LINK was largely successful in its goals of increasing engagement and fostering intergenerational learning opportunities among students and community mentors. The data also revealed trends that speak to the Jackson Center’s progress in preserving the Northside community; for example, previous CPL Fellow Kendra Oliver-Derry increased the percentage of students of color living in Northside through LINK recruitment, resisting whitewashing in the historically Black Northside neighborhood.