Newsletter: Volume 1
Resources and updates on prevention strategy and implementation, from CoAlign Consulting.
This edition covers practical ideas for enabling project lead capacity + announces a new Coaching Cohort offering.
This is our first newsletter. Thanks for being with us from the beginning!
— Astraea Howard, Founder
One way to unstick your program? Do less.
During a recent presentation I gave for the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, 88% of the sexual and domestic violence prevention professionals in attendance said they have seen a program or strategy stall out.
That wasn't surprising.
Our field has strong, evidence-based programs. What’s hard is bridging the gap between a great idea to sustainable implementation. Moving a strategy into practice is a behavior change problem, not an information problem. It takes sustained energy and commitment over months, which is easy to underestimate.
When a new project comes along, the default in most organizations is to add it on top of someone's existing workload. Every obligation carries administrative overhead, the meetings and emails and planning required to keep it moving, along with the actual work itself. If nothing comes off the project lead’s plate when something new goes on, their workload balloons to a level nobody can sustain.
In the short term, it means the project lead doesn’t have the time or mental capacity to make real progress on the new initiative. They get pulled in a hundred directions and only have room for small pieces of the project, not the bigger efforts that move things forward.
In the long term, it produces overwhelm, burnout, and turnover. When the lead leaves, they take the relationships and institutional knowledge they’ve built with them, and the program is back at square one.
If an organization is intentional from the beginning about building their project lead's capacity, they can make consistent progress, day after day, instead of in bursts between other priorities. That visible progress is what keeps everyone engaged and builds momentum.
To get there, lead capacity needs to be seen not just as an individual time management problem, but a structural workload management problem. The project lead rarely has the authority to stop current work themselves. Most of what they're carrying was assigned by their supervisor or included in their grant deliverables. They need leadership backing to meaningfully reduce their obligations and make space for the new initiative.
If you are the project lead:
Create a proposed 'Stop Doing' list
Write down everything on your plate. All current projects and responsibilities, recurring meetings, ad hoc TA, and the ideas still floating around in your head.
Rate each item on how mission critical it is and how much it costs you in time and attention.
Sort what you have:
Low impact, high resource. Things to stop. This is your first place to free up capacity.
Low impact, low resource. Things to automate, hand off, or eliminate.
High impact, low resource. Protect these and look for more of them.
High impact, high resource. Set a cap on how many you carry at once, and do not add another until one ends.
Take the list to your supervisor and ask for specific things to be taken off your workload. Name what you want to stop, what it frees up, and what you’ll do with the new capacity.
If you are a supervisor
Have your staff do the exercise above, then support them in winding down the low impact tasks. They need your authorization to free up their capacity.
Hold to one in, one out. When someone takes on a new project, something comes off.
If you are a funder
Ask about recipient capacity before you add a new initiative to the grant: who is the operational lead, what else are they carrying, and what is stopped to make space for this project.
Make it easy for subrecipients to drop a deliverable when you ask them to take on something new.
This doesn’t solve everything about implementation. Capacity is only one of eight elements that shape whether a new prevention strategy takes hold or stalls out in the Program Implementation Roadmap. But an operational lead with real capacity, backed by leadership, is a crucial piece of any successful rollout's foundation.
CoAlign Updates
We are launching a Program Implementation Coaching Cohort!
Built around the Program Implementation Roadmap, the Cohort will help you apply each of the eight roadmap elements to your prevention program, so you can see where your rollout is getting stuck and what you can do about it. You'll work alongside a small group of peers doing similar work in other states. Every coaching session ends with one action you commit to doing before the next session, generating small wins along the way.
You leave with an assessment of where your program stands, an implementation roadmap built for it, and a 90-day action plan already in motion.
At a glance:
Six 90-minute virtual coaching sessions
Tuesdays: October 6 & 20, November 3 & 17, December 1 & 15
Tailored to prevention staff at sexual and domestic violence coalitions and state health departments
Capped at 10 participants
$850 per participant, 16-22 hours total over the ten weeks
Registration closes September 25, 2026
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