W3A2 Wald Cap

Portfolio of Visions

The Portfolio of Visions Paper is intended to help you coalesce your thinking about what you have learned while participating in the MSL program, consider who you are becoming as a scholar-practitioner, and conceptualize a future vision for your life. This is based upon the idea that most successful people in the world plan their current lives and their futures. The MSL program has been designed to bring a rigorous academic experience together with the student's desire to become a consummate scholar-practitioner committed to producing social impacts in order to better the plight of humanity. This is done with the full knowledge that you are most whole when you live an integrated way of life with a desire to always becoming a better "self." To that end, the Portfolio of Visions provides you with the opportunity to bring these disparate parts of your life into to a focused way of being. See attachment - Portfolio of Visions template to see the parameters for the project and begin working through the assignments.

Proposal Project

The Capstone Proposal Project Option

The Capstone Proposal Project provides you with an opportunity to frame a social impact project that could be funded by a foundation, corporation, venture capital firm, government agency, or other capital resource. The method used for this Capstone Proposal is to identify a service, program, or product the student believes will have a social impact in their organization, neighborhood, city, state, country, or globally. While you are encouraged to think on a large scale, you are advised to create a pilot program that if successful can be replicated on a much larger scale. For example, if you want to develop a leadership training program for a school district, the pilot might focus on one particular school, allowing you to work out the flaws and to learn from the smaller experience before moving on to the larger entity. Likewise if you have a product you believe is worthy of introducing into a market, you would be advised to field test the product in a representative area before trying to market the product more globally. In addition to being a prudent business strategy, funders or financial backers often want to field test ideas before fully investing in them on a much larger basis. If on the other hand, if you are working for an organization, you might want to take an existing idea, service, program, or product and expand it. Then you already have in effect "piloted" the program and service and are looking to now broaden its reach. In either case however, you must look at the larger picture and think in the larger more macro context as part of writing the proposal: From the larger idea comes the pilot. The emphasis for this Capstone Proposal Project is a proposal designed to create a real-world social impact should it become funded. Therefore, you must write a well-organized proposal that has real-world potential for funding. The proposal must match criteria outlined by a foundation of your choosing. There are too many potential grant makers to provide a comprehensive list; however, a brief list of selected potential funding sources is listed in the resources section of the course to give you a start. For foundations not included on the list, use the Foundation Center link in the Syllabus to obtain information on foundations of which you might be more familiar. Other helpful source links are also provided to give a head start on finding funding. You can also obtain information for venture capital firms by using the business and government libraries as an initial source. The format for this project proposal will help you develop a general proposal that can be tailored to meet the funding criteria for a major foundation proposal after the conclusion of your program here at Walden University. Every foundation and funding source has its unique criteria and application processes. However, by completing this project proposal format you will be well on your way towards being able to submit a proposal to an actual foundation. See attachment - Capstone Proposal Project template to begin documenting your work throughout the duration of this course.

Research Project

The Capstone Research Project Option

The Capstone Research Paper provides you with an opportunity to explore a social impact research interest in depth. You will identify one or two research questions and a problem to be solved and then explore the subject matter with academic rigor. You will then write a paper that is a minimum of 25 pages and does not exceed 30 pages on the subject of your choosing as long as it relates to some theme studied in the MSL program. (The length of the paper does not include such things as title page, abstract, list of references, appendices, etc.) This is a summary narrative form of paper and should not use questions as headings or lead-ins to the narration. Graduate level critical thinking and writing should be applied when writing this paper and the use of questions should be minimized and focused. This paper will be well grounded in the literature and the subject must be a real-world social impact problem to be solved. You are strongly advised to write about a problem with which you are truly familiar and to apply theory to solve the problem. It is envisioned that you will write about an organization, community, or social issue with which you are intimately involved. You will cite at least 20 sources from refereed journals, 15 of which must not have been used during your course of study. You may also use textbooks for the remaining five sources to complete the 20-citation source requirement. The purpose of this paper is for you to demonstrate depth of knowledge and the ability to function as a scholar-practitioner. You will use the APA 6th edition as the source reference for formatting and writing the paper. This paper is a rigorous study of some phenomena and you are expected to stay on point with the subject and to produce a final paper that is worthy of publication. In addition to the APA guidelines for formatting papers, you should use the chapter headings from the downloadable template below.

See attachment – Research Project template