View Printable VersionHow SAI Can Help You
Comprehensive Facilitation
The goal of our comprehensive facilitation training is to assist groups, organizations, and individuals in developing a results-oriented action plan. By participating in the SAI facilitation process, people identify concrete steps necessary to achieve their mission.
SAI uses the Social Reconnaissance model as its primary facilitation tool. The Social Reconnaissance model is a community assessment approach designed to create grassroots involvement and ownership of the community assessment and change process by engaging community members in a results-oriented process. A variety of community stakeholders are brought together in a tightly timed series of community meetings and focus groups, and surveys are completed to identify resources, share information, and broaden engagement in a community-wide coalition.
The approach has three components: identifying problems, identifying barriers to solving problems, and identifying solutions to barriers (a fourth component related to resource development may be added). Each component of the community assessment creates greater grassroots involvement in the coalition through information sharing, collaborative planning, outreach, and feedback to the community. With increased community ownership and expansion of the coalition, the community assessment process yields significant concrete results.
SAI consultants are highly skilled at using this model to facilitate comprehensive strategic planning sessions. This model has been tailored for use on issues such as methamphetamine, homeland security, school violence, and educational reform. Over the past few years, SAI has successfully used this facilitation process with thousands of people with documented results.
Leadership Connection/Nonprofit Turnaround
What does it take to turn a moderately sized, ably run nonprofit into a financially sound, unwavering, mission-driven business?
SAI’s Leadership Connection series, which consists of workshops, half and full-day seminars, and multi-day retreats, explores such business acumen as mission and values, leadership, human resource management, crisis management, strategy, budgeting, and growth that can help you turn around your non-profit organization.
SAI works with its clients to conduct comprehensive assessments of the organization. We examine all areas of the business including managerial, corporate governance, financial, programmatic, and fundraising. Following the assessment, we develop for the client a strategic course of action, which includes a focus on both short and long-term change. In order to assist in the implementation of the recommendations, a team of SAI consultants is assigned to the client for a specific period of time.
In conjunction with the Leadership Connection, SAI provides non-profit and faith-based groups with ongoing support in the areas of government relations, fund development, training and facilitation, strategic planning, and speaking engagements.
View Detailed information about Leadership Connection/Nonprofit Turnaround
Meth Training Center
The production, distribution, and use of methamphetamine have created a major crisis in health and safety for our country. Meth activity is a primary cause in the rapid increase of crime and violence in rural and urban areas. Meth is the most compelling and complicated of the drug issues facing this generation. The United Nations expects it to be the #1 drug problem internationally over the next five years.
Because of the nature of clandestine meth labs, an effective response to meth requires a comprehensive and coordinated effort across an unusual array of sectors: public officials, first responders/fire/EMS/HazMat, law enforcement, courts, prosecutors, corrections, prevention, treatment, environmental clean up, public health, child protection, education, media, and community organizations. Meth labs are not defined or restricted to specific neighborhoods in communities. They are mobile and they are highly toxic.
Many of the problems associated with meth are new and require new relationships and new protocols for local, state, and federal agencies. Communities and states need access to cutting-edge information, training, and effective practices about strategies to fight this many-headed monster. Currently there is no centralized coordinated center to provide cutting-edge information or facilitate training for the public and private organizations seeking to confront this new challenge.
SAI is launching a National Meth Training and Technical Assistance Center with regional training sites located throughout the United States. The Center will:
- Serve as a national repository and dissemination vehicle on all topics related to meth.
- Convene state and local planning processes, replicating the current Meth Summit design that facilitates the coordinated and integrated response to meth across sectors (i.e. Lab Cleanup, Law Enforcement Safety, Environmental Contamination, Drug Endangered Children, Treatment, Prevention, and Community Mobilization) and across jurisdictions.
- Collect, analyze, and disseminate best practices across the many sectors of the problem.
- Develop a web-based information sharing system to speed dissemination of effective practices.
- Facilitate “communities of practice” within and between the various sectors involved in responding to the meth issue to promote innovation and change.
- Publish policy briefs, newsletters, and tool kits to support the capacity of agencies, communities, and states to respond to the meth issue effectively.
- Facilitate “Policy to Practice Forums” at the State and Local level to identify and promote effective implementation of policies and strategies that demonstrate results in reducing meth production, distribution, and use.
