Technical Report Delivery to Family Development Foundation

Given the current governmental priorities for social service development in Abu Dhabi and the United Arab Emirates, a trained cadre of professional social workers is needed in a fast growing economically, and socially evolving country to take on the multi-level roles of program design, development, implementation, evaluation and management.

September 24, 2015

Given the current governmental priorities for social service development in Abu Dhabi and the United Arab Emirates, a trained cadre of professional social workers is needed in a fast growing economically, and socially evolving country to take on the multi-level roles of program design, development, implementation, evaluation and management. The Family Development Foundation (FDF) demonstrated the desire to design and implement innovative and responsive programs to address issues of social priority.

Columbia School of Social Work and the Columbia Global Centers | Amman, in collaboration with FDF, initiated a partnership to strength FDF’s role as the leading institution in social service provision. In addition to the provision of several capacity-building training programs, the partnership consisted of conducting a technical needs assessment with addressing staff capacity and perception related to service provision readiness to inform the strategic relationship between the Foundation and Columbia University.

In February 2015, the first phase of activities of the partnership was concluded by conducting a needs assessment, delivering two tailored training programs: “Foundations of Social Work” and “Research Methods and Logic Model,” and generating an in-depth report that presented a discussion of findings and conclusions from data sets generated by the needs assessment. A technical report and five-year proposal was subsequently developed to inform a five-year partnership road map. The five-year proposal was delivered to FDF in a recent visit to Abu Dhabi on September 24-30, 3015 conducted by Diala Al Dabbas, Manager of the Institute for Sustainable Development, Timothy Hunt, Director of Training and Capacity Building for Columbia School of Social Work’s Social Intervention Group, and Lina Hamdan, Social Work Fellow.