Tool 2 – Start-Up

Once partners involved in community safety and well-being planning have established an advisory committee or implementation team(s), they should document important information pertaining to each group, including background/context, goals/purpose, objectives and performance measures, membership, and roles and responsibilities. Making sure that everyone knows what they are trying to achieve will help the group(s) stay on track and identify successes of the plan.

For many planning partners, this will be done using a terms of reference. The following was created to guide the development of this type of document. Some planning partners may decide to develop a terms of reference for their advisory committee and each implementation team, while others may decide to develop one that includes information on each group; this will depend on a variety of factors such as the community's size, their number of risk factors and implementation team(s).

Background and Context

When developing a terms of reference, planning partners may wish to begin by providing the necessary background information, including how they have reached the point of developing an advisory committee or implementation team, and briefly describing the context within which they will operate. This should be brief, but include enough detail so that any new member will have the necessary information to understand the project's context.

Goals and Purpose

Planning partners may then wish to identify:

 the need for their advisory committee or implementation team (i.e., why the group was created and how its work will address an identified need); and

 the goal(s) of their group/project. A goal is a big-picture statement, about what planning partners want to achieve through their work – it is the change they want to make within the timeframe of their project.

Objectives and Performance Measures

If the planning partners' goal is what they plan to achieve through their work, then their objectives are how they will get there – the specific activities/tasks that must be performed to achieve each goal. It is important to ensure that goals and objectives are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Results-focused and Time-bound (SMART) so that partners will know exactly what information to look at to tell if they have achieved them. Information and data that help planning partners monitor and evaluate the achievement of goals and objectives are called performance measures or performance indicators. See Section 5 of the toolkit for more information and guidance on performance measures.

For each goal identified, planning partners may list specific objectives/deliverables that will signify achievement of the goal when finished. For each objective/deliverable, they may list the measures that will be used to evaluate the success of the results achieved. To help planning partners stay organized, they may wish to create a chart such as the one below, which includes example goals/objectives and performance measures.