PROPEL Adapt Project Year 1 Quarter 1 Report

The interim Project Director, Mr. Oscar Cordon, Senior Director for the Technical Services and Innovation (TSI) team at Action Against Hunger USA, oversaw the project's initial phase. A partners' kickoff meeting was held in the first week of October 2022 to orient the PROPEL Adapt consortium partners to the status of the new award, activities required for the first 90 days, and the anticipated timeline for sharing sub-award agreements with core partners. The project team began developing the Branding Strategy and Marking Plan in November 2022, including exploring the development of a project logo. Due to the absence of in-house capacity and limited bandwidth on the Action Against Hunger USA communications team, the PROPEL Adapt team contracted with an outside graphics designer to develop logo and type mark options. The proposed type of mark was submitted for review and approval to USAID with the second draft Branding Strategy and Marking Plan in late December 2022. The recruitment process for PROPEL Adapt staff positions was initiated immediately following the signature of the project's cooperative agreement. Action Against Hunger USA Human Resources teams developed and posted job descriptions for the initial central level staff, including the Administration and Finance Director, Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Director, and Senior Program Officer positions. By the end of the first quarter, PROPEL Adapt had held multiple interviews for each of the three positions, but only the Senior Program Officer position was filled. Job descriptions for the remaining central level positions were developed, posted, and sourcing initiated. The PROPEL Adapt team held a meet-and-greet with the MOMENTUM Integrated Health Resilience (MIHR) team on December 14, 2022, at the IMA World Health office in Washington, DC. This meeting was attended by the MIHR project and technical leadership, as well as the project and both PROPEL Adapt's Project Director and technical leads. Through this meeting, PROPEL Adapt learned MIHR's key program areas and country buy-ins, key lessons learned in developing their project focus, and where they are getting requests for technical support in the field that falls outside of their project scope. Throughout this quarter, a high priority focus for the PROPEL Adapt team was its development of a set of core funded activities with which to launch the project. The Core Leadership Team developed a timeline and tracker for creating activities, brainstormed ideas that aligned with the project's Intermediate Results and Sub-Intermediate Results, and began drafting brief paragraphs to share with the AOR team for review. Following a discussion with the AOR technical team, PROPEL Adapt submitted an initial list of possible core funded activities for Year 1 in mid-November. Based on the review and feedback from the AOR team, PROPEL Adapt expanded the initial list into narrative concept notes with sections for background, a rationale for the proposed activity, a technical approach, a detailed set of tasks, deliverables, and indicators, and an estimate of resource requirements needed to complete the activities.