Transcript Community Assessment - Nonprofit Capacity Building

Community Needs
Assessments
Thomas P. Holland, Ph.D., Professor
UGA Institute for Nonprofit
Organizations
Why conduct a
Community Assessment?
• To get information about public attitudes or
opinions about specific issues, problems, needs,
opportunities in the community
• Identify how people rank order issues in terms of
importance or urgency
• Provide public input to policies, goals, priorities
• Assess public support for initiatives
• End speculation about “what people are
thinking” or “what people really want”
• Build partnerships for change
Assessments may focus on
• Local assets, resources, activities,
opportunities
• Proposed legislation or policy change
• Gaps, barriers, needs
• Attitudes, perceptions, behaviors, skills
Assessments can help a
community by
• Improving understanding of the issues families face and
want to address
• Identifying hidden strengths or underutilized resources to
be developed
• Understanding needs, gaps, or barriers to using services
• Determining which resources could contribute to desired
changes and how to use them
• Promoting engagement of citizens in collaborative efforts
to make changes on issues that concern them
• Empowering people by providing roles in developing
better understanding of others’ views and in formulating
action steps to make changes together
Asset Mapping
• Examines strengths and resources of people and
organizations
• May include skills, interests, experiences, resources,
programs
• What could each person or organization contribute for
others?
• Identify opportunities and barriers to sharing assets
(such as location, accessibility, awareness,
understanding, trust)
• Issues in matching assets with the concerns of others
• Issues of perceived appropriateness and quality
Who should be involved?
• Identify a sponsoring group, organization, or
coalition to manage project and lend credibility.
• Invite other groups to participate in planning the
assessment.
• Don’t leave out any leader or group that may be
important to implementing findings.
• Be prepared to negotiate compromises among
interests of organizational representatives,
consumers, sponsors, others
• Recruit volunteers to gather the information
• Prepare community to expect and use the
findings
Guiding Principles
• A shared vision statement will point toward information
needed to take action.
• Focus on specific issues, and don’t try to cover
everything.
• Draw upon diverse perspectives, not just the familiar
ones.
• Involve many participants in developing plan, collecting
information, interpreting results, formulating action steps.
• Communicate! Make sure participants and respondents
understand what is expected.
• Make the whole process a learning opportunity for
everyone.
• Coordinate efforts through a central person or team to
avoid duplications or gaps.
• Be prepared to act on findings.
Key Steps
• Establish inclusive planning committee to solicit
involvement, develop plan of action, oversee
implementation.
• Identify the shared vision and the important issues to be
addressed.
• Identify what specific information is needed and how
best to get it.
• Build on previous assessments and available
information.
• Specify the population and sample to be contacted.
• Develop and pre-test questionnaire.
• Train volunteers to gather information
• Collect and analyze the data.
• Report the results.
• Identify priorities and formulate action steps to achieve
them them.
Approaches to collecting information
(may use combinations)
• In-person interviews
– Key informants or opinion leaders
– Sample of population
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Telephone interviews
Self-administered questionnaires
Focus group discussions
Community forums
Review of data already available
Key Informant Approach
• Seeks information from selected leaders in
positions to know community issues, such as
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Elected officials
Business executives
Leaders of public service organizations
Professionals in specific service areas
• Requires interview questions and interviewers
• Advantages
– Gets depth of information
– Relatively easy and inexpensive
• Disadvantages
– May get biased views
– May overlook important perspectives (consumers’ views)
Public Forum Approach
• Uses open public meetings to discuss community
concerns
• May include questions such as
– What are the most important issues facing our community/
neighborhood?
– What has been tried? What helped/ didn’t help?
– What could we do to improve the situation?
• Requires ground rules and strong leadership to
sustain focus
• Advantages
– Open to a wide range of people and views
– Encourages active participation
– Inexpensive
• Disadvantages
– Views may not be representative
– May turn into gripe session
– May generate more questions, unrealistic expectations, discontents
Focus Group Approach
• Uses a number of small groups to identify and
examine issues
• Requires open-ended questions and skill in
group facilitation
• Advantages
– Allows many people to be involved without intimidation
of large audience
– Allows in-depth examination of issues
– Inexpensive
• Disadvantages
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Requires skills in group facilitation
Scheduling participation is a challenge
Discussions may drift into tangential areas
Limited time, limited discussions
Results may be difficult to interpret
• Variants: nominal group and Delphi techniques
The Survey Approach
• Systematic information gathered from a sample
of residents
• Uses specific questions, administered by inperson interviews, telephone interviews, selfadministered, mailed
• Requires skills in designing questionnaire,
selecting sample, analyzing responses
• Advantages
– Broad range of people may be included
– Representative findings
• Disadvantages
– Costly to develop and administer
– Requires specialized skills
– Not much depth on issues examined
Examples of discussion questions
• What opportunities or services does your family want
most? Why?
• How well do the services of this organization meet your
needs?
• What gaps or unmet needs concern you most?
• What attracts you to a service or resource?
• What barriers do you see to finding and using services
you need?
• What new opportunities would you like to see for your
family/ your children?
• What do you see as the important strengths and assets
of this community?
• What conditions in our community benefit your family/
make it more difficult for your family?
• What recommendations do you have about this matter?
Examples of useful indicators
• Health
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Immunization rates for young children
Percentage of babies with low birth weight
Rates of early prenatal care
Rates of births to single mothers under 18
Views of health services accessibility
• Economic conditions
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Poverty rates
Numbers of students receiving subsidized lunches
Young adults in school or employed
Housing mobility rates
Views of economic opportunities/ barriers
More examples of indicators
• School success
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Rates of Head Start and preschool participation
Measures of academic performance
Student mobility rates
Graduation rates, drop-out rates
Views of school needs
• Family issues
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Numbers of children in foster care
Numbers of families on child care waiting lists
Numbers of DFCS cases
Juvenile incarceration rates
Views of family needs
Using the Findings
• Process must have included people who can act
on the findings
• Findings should support specific conclusions
and recommendations for action
• Report must be easy to understand
• Select priorities (you can’t work on everything at once)
• May allocate issues among several work groups
• Identify specific targets for change
• Recruit or develop skills and resources for action
• Monitor progress and communicate successes
widely
• Be prepared to deal with barriers without losing
momentum
Challenge
• Design a community assessment plan that
a coalition of nonprofit organizations could
implement in New Orleans soon after a
large number of its residents have
returned.
• Show how that plan makes use of the
principles and approaches covered in the
course material on community
assessment.