Assignment Task:
Overview:
The final project for this course is the creation of a grant proposal.
The assessment for this course is to construct a grant proposal that targets a current area of developmental, behavioral, or diagnostic need for your community's children or adolescents. The final project represents an authentic demonstration of competency because it requires you to apply concepts from across the child and adolescent curriculum to compose an original grant proposal for a theoretically supported, age-specific, and effective intervention program. Some terms grant proposals commonly use include problem identification, prevalence, assessment of resources, the impact of the problem, and implementation plan. The critical elements listed in the prompt reveal the meaning of these grant terms. The prompt asks you to devise a grant proposal to submit in the field of psychology. Grant proposals may request funding for research, training, institutional upgrades, nonprofit center grants, funding opportunities, grants for children's programs, or grants for specific outreach programs, such as engaging underrepresented cultures. This task aims to assess your understanding of concepts from across the child and adolescent curriculum.
Some real-world examples of grant proposal ideas have included:
School/Educational Setting
Orchard Middle School has more than 50 at-risk students whose reading performance directly affects their self-esteem and negative behavior issues. The school submitted a grant proposal to support the development of a program to help all students with poor reading skills learn to read at grade level. The program would also help them increase their reading speed, comprehension, reading attention span, and overall sense of worth, esteem, and achievement. Studies have shown those who do better in school fare better with stable mental health.
Outpatient Mental Health
The Open Arms Family Center requested a grant of $250,000 to contribute to the start-up funds for a family homeless shelter and mental health services. As an innovative, all-inclusive shelter program, the center aims to provide for 10 families with children under five experiencing homelessness. The center is committed to its mission of decreasing the overall number of homeless families in the Metro Boston area and working to break the cycle of homelessness.
Community Outreach
Healthy Tomorrows aims to stimulate innovative community-based programs that employ prevention strategies to promote nationwide access to healthcare for children and their families. Funding supports direct-service projects, not research projects. Healthy Tomorrows supports family-centered initiatives that implement innovative resource approaches to promote community; define preventive child health and developmental objectives for vulnerable children and their families, especially those with limited access to quality health services; foster cooperation among community organizations, agencies, and families; involve pediatricians and other pediatric, child, and adolescent mental health professionals; build community and statewide partnerships among professionals in health, education, social services, government, and business to achieve self-sustaining programs to ensure healthy children and families.
Healthy Tomorrows requested a grant proposal of $10,000 to conduct a needs analysis for a meal-delivery program to serve its less-mobile community members.
Review the grant-writing resources available in Modules One and Seven.
The project includes three milestones you will submit throughout the course to scaffold learning and ensure quality final submissions. You will submit these milestones in Modules Three, Five, and Seven. The final submission will occur in Module Nine.
In this assignment, you will demonstrate your mastery of the following course outcomes:
Assess contemporary theories of development for their strengths and weaknesses in addressing current developmental, behavioral, and diagnostic issues for children and adolescents
Critique the major criteria used to classify children and adolescents with specific disorders established by the American Psychiatric Association
Evaluate the influence of individual, familial, environmental, cultural, and political factors for their current impact on the diagnostic process for children and adolescents
Evaluate child and adolescent development resources and support services in terms of accessibility, organization, funding, and overall effectiveness
Assess the ethical implications of research and program development in the field of child and adolescent psychology
Analyze the effectiveness of theoretically-supported intervention strategies to address the current developmental, behavioral, and diagnostic needs of children and adolescents