GRANT RESOURCE CENTER

April 2005 Featured Article

Conducting a Community Needs Assessment

Pat Bohse, President of Bohse & Associates, Inc.

Happy Spring!

This month’s article is on the importance and the how-to’s of conducting a Community Needs Assessment. We are recommending that local municipalities consider conducting a Community Needs Assessment because it will provide them with valuable information that could be used in a variety of ways such as justifying grants, designing new local programs, promoting collaboration among local agencies and businesses, and supporting funders in decision making.

The results of a Community Needs Assessment can provide your municipality with good information about what services are needed in the community; how the citizens of your community view present services; what their recommendations are for improvements; and, identifying any new needs that the community may need to address.

Steps to Conducting a Community Needs Assessment:

Appoint a task force/committee to oversee the project and determine the timeline, the focus of the assessment, the tools and how the outcomes will be reported.
The task force/committee will identify the stakeholders who will be part of the assessment. These stakeholders can come from the following:
                •Local elected officials                       •Paid municipal staff
                •Community volunteers                        •Community members
                •Educational organizations                     •Business groups
                •Social/cultural/recreational organizations
                •Environmental groups                         •Senior group
                •Churches/Synagogues                       •Other

Once the stakeholders have been identified the next decision will be deciding upon the focus of your Community Needs Assessment. Is it going to be a general assessment versus specific (e.g. general would be any concerns of the citizenship - specific would be individual
topics such as crime, safety, housing, etc.)?

4.	Next, you will need to develop the questionnaire/survey and decide what forum will be used to capture the information (i.e. public meetings, focus groups, questionnaires, telephone surveys, mass mailings, and/or interviewing key community representatives).

The following links are good examples:

Links to tools on how to conduct a Community Needs Assessment:

• Utah State University Extension

• Port Jervis New York

Links to completed reports as a result of Community Needs Assessments:

• Oxford County, Southwestern Ontario

• Essex County, Ontario

Next steps:

Implement the plan with a timeline
Generate a final report with recommendations
Leverage the final report for future growth of the municipality
WOW your future funders!

If you have any questions regarding conducting a Community Needs Assessment in your municipality, please feel free to contact Bohse & Associates, Inc. at 732-291-8038, or email Pat Boshe, president of Bohse & Associates, Inc. at pbohse@bohse.com.

Full version of April Article in Adobe PDF format for printing.

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