Final Report
     
    Source: De La Salle Lipa Online Campus News
    Summary of the major enrichment activities carried out by Project K to enhance the reading and learning skills of pupils.
     
    Project K's Big Leap (Article from De La Salle Lipa Online Campus News)
    Supporting Documents
   
    Summary and Conclusion
    The last year of Project K has been a very busy year for the Project Team but all activities have been carried out as planned with more concentration on monitoring and evaluation activities. The project has given rich experiences and taught valuable lessons to implementers and stakeholders/participants and these can be summarized as follows:
   
  1. Strategic and tactical approach
    1. document the currrent state of education, particularly reading, as a baseline for understanding and a starting point from which protocol can be developed for visioning and strategy development for reading proficiency improvement.
    2. work with stakeholders through the DepEd, LGU, Youth Council and other sectors to define a desired reading proficiency level that is acceptable and realistic.
    3. develop strategies and implement activities, building on scientific best practice, and enabling and empowering stakeholders to work towards the achievement of the goal.
  2. Benefit of stakeholder wisdom and empowerment be brought to the fore.
    The key to success of the project is massive multi-sectoral participation of stakeholders and intensive consultation with them in every process. Lesson points to the benefits of bringing tot he fore stakeholders wisdom and empowerment. The project implementers supported the mind shift from one of "telling" or "teaching" to one of sharing knowledge, influencing wise decisions and facilitating the identification of problems as well as solution. We recognize that stakeholders represent a wider range of people or groups potentially affected by a new system process, therefore to succeed, we must be able to synthesize their requirements into a cohesive vision.
  3. Built on what we have.
    Before the project developed its strategic plan and embarked on the new activities, a review of existing programs and plans was made. All beneficial and worthwhile projects were retained for reinforcements and support by the project in terms of financial and logistic requirements. This made ownership of the project easier and spontaneous among the beneficiaries and participants. We anticipated that a sense of ownership developed increases the likelihood of cooperation and participation.
  4. Two stesp forward, one step back.
    We have accepted the fact that a project with multi-sectoral participation no problem-free because:
    1. it is not easy to obtain agreement and commitment in a short time given that we have diverse range of stakeholders and there is difficulty in representing the multiplicity of views of different stakeholders, that is, not everybody understands the position of everybody else.
    2. varying work culture and attitude cause some delays in the conduct of activities
    3. stakeholders expect immediate results and tangible demonstration of the effects and benefits.
     
    We made sure that the project participants understand the internal dynamics of their project, its successes and failures and in proposing solutions to overcome obstacles.
     
    The project implementers and participants/benificiaries are forever grateful for the financial assistance extended by Ford Foundation. As shown in Plan for Sustainability, the project has served as a catalyst for more aggressive implementation of reading programs that will be carried out by more organizations, hopefully in a wider setting involving more beneficiaries.