Community Action Plans (CAPs) are what will guide your coalition and organize you into action. It combines high-level goals with executions to show true progress and improve issues in your communities. Having structure and something to base evaluation on is how to get the best results out of your coalition.

Elements of a CAP

The first thing to do is look at the distribution of the scores across the dimensions. Are they all about the same? Are some lower than others? It is important to increase the community readiness levels of the dimensions that have the lowest scores. Suppose your community readiness scores look like the following:

• Knowledge of Efforts: 2
• Leadership: 2
• Community Climate: 2
• Knowledge of the Issue: 4
• Resources: 3

Knowledge of Efforts, Leadership, and Community Climate have the lowest scores – all of them received a score of 2. That means your community should work first to raise the levels of these dimensions. Once you have carefully analyzed your community readiness findings, you can formulate goals.

A goal is a statement of general purpose and direction, or what you wish to accomplish. For the community scores above, one goal might be to increase leadership’s awareness of the issue in the community. Below we will give more detail about setting objectives to help you achieve your goals