Below is a rough workplan that our interns have been following for their initial research tasks in the first month on the job:

(1) KEY ORGANIZATIONS & KEY INDIVIDUALS

Identify and input into the website the organizations and key contacts for government agencies, non-profit, foundations, media, higher ed institutions in Trenton, Mercer County, New Jersey, and select national.

(2) CURRENT POLICY

Identify and profile currently funded programs in budgets of the City of Trenton, Trenton School Board, Mercer County, and area Foundations and the United Way (for the later two we'll focus only on funding that relates to Trenton specifically). Later we'll identify & profile the public laws that authorize these programs.

(3) SCOPE OF THE PROBLEM & PROPOSED SOLUTIONS

We need to get specific policy option questions from area non-profits (Pat, can you help here?) that we can assign to each intern to search out the statistics that define the problem and then search nationally (internationally?) for a range of policy options or model programs that are successfully addressing that problem. Once these are assigned, we'll go over the Issue Brief Writers Guide in greater depth. Also, we'll hopefully meet personally with the non-profit staff who are requesting the research so we can better understand the research question and get insight from them on what information they can point us to as you begin.

(4) NEWS

Catalog and set up a system for monitoring news sources as it relates to Trenton (funding, legislation, regulations, meetings, publications, court action, executive action). Here we will need to figure out what sources we'll need to do one or more of the following with:

• subscribe to listserv
• subscribe to RSS feed
• visit website regularly
• put ourselves on email or mailing list for press releases and other announcements, & annual reports
• other?

We'll have to prioritize what issue areas we want to track, as well as determine how best to coordinate our efforts in inputting what we find into the website. This work will be continued during the school year by TCNJ student interns, so we'll also need to write a job description and guide for those interns.

(5) RESOURCES

At some point, we search for resources for the various areas currently listed on the site:

• Advocacy
• Civic Action
• Collaboration
• Communications
• Evaluation
• Finance
• Fundraising
• Higher Education
• Legal
• Libraries
• Nonprofits
• Philanthropy
• Social Entrepreneurs
• Technology
• Volunteers

These resources will include: books, conferences, movies, articles, reports, magazines, training modules, best practices, periodicals, and websites. As with the news section above, we'll need to determine how best to track new resource opportunities for input into the website. This will also become part of the school year interns' job description.

(6) FEEDBACK ON POLICYOPTIONS.ORG WEBSITE

Throughout the above research, writing, and data entry we will be de-bugging and refining the PolicyOptions.org website. It will have many little bugs and components that aren't available or finished, so everyone will be identifying problems as they occur (via an email to me) and features or screens that need to be created or refined (via an email to me and through group discussion of these). This is a critical part of our summer work since our goal is to have a fully operational data entry and public website to launch Trenton.PolicyOptions.org in September AND to have a guide for other campuses to begin their own local PolicyOptions.org Bureau.