Provisionally Approved 4/25/02

COMMUNITY NEEDS AND RESOURCE ANALYSIS

Level II

RATIONALE:   To be effective and responsive, a planner must have an understanding of the needs and resources present in a community.    Needs assessment should be concerned with the identification of the basic needs of people, as individuals, families, communities, and societies.  How people meet their needs depending upon what is important and what is possible.   All communities, including those that are very poor, have resources such as people, organizations, and institutions, that can help address individual and shared needs.   A planner’s efforts should be based upon an understanding of a community’s potential (or capacity) to address its own needs.   Planners use various methods to identify needs and resources.   For example, needs and resource assessment can be initiated by those who have unmet needs, or by informal community networks, or by people working in formal organizations that provide services or funding.  The key to effective planning is utilize approaches that can most effectively identify as many of the available local resources in a community as possible and to connect them in ways that draw upon their added strengths and potential to meet needs.

COMPETENCY:  Can identify and analyze community needs and resources within the larger context of community issues.

CRITERIA:

1.      Identify a social or geographic community

2.      Describe at least six issues important to the community and the needs that they may reflect

3.      Identify a range of resources available to a community and how they might be used to address the needs

4.      Design a plan to investigate the needs and resources associated with one of the community issues described in Criterion 2.

PORTFOLIO LINKS: All writing required by this competency should be guided by the writing requirements of Communications Portfolio II.  At minimum, the writing should demonstrate Level I Communications Portfolio standards.  

STANDARDS:

1.      For Criterion 1, the community must be at least 1,000 people and approved by an evaluator.

2.       

a.       Briefly describe the six community issues in Criterion 2, including evidence to substantiate the importance of the issue to the community.  This substantiating evidence should include a sampling of residents’ perceptions, external observations of interactions with people and standard information sources about the community such as government data.

b.      The explanation of the relationship between the needs and the issues described in Criterion 2 should reflect an understanding of how needs can give rise to community issues.   The explanation should address the following: who defines and identifies needs, who does not contribute to this process, their barriers to involvement and why.

3.      The description of resources in the community for Criterion 3 should include an analysis of the following community resources:       

• Individuals:  People in the community such as artists, youth, elderly, etc. What skills do people contribute to the community or sell in the labor market?
• Citizen’s Associations:  Religious and cultural groups.  What community groups exist and for what purpose?
• Informal Social Networks and Communications:  Community newspapers, sports activities, neighborhood festivals, local fairs, etc.   How do people learn about important news in the community?
• Local institutions:   Businesses, schools, hospitals, etc.  What are each institutions assets?  What services do they contribute to the community?
• Physical characteristics:  Parks, open space, land, transportation, architecture, etc.   What resources are available in terms of renewable space or underutilized space? 

4.      The plan for criterion 4 must include:

a.       identification of the issue chosen and the reason for the choice

b.      the types of questions about needs and resources that the proposed investigation would seek to answer

c.       the techniques and sources the investigation would use to answer the questions.

EXAMPLES OF DEMONSTRATION:

1.      Prior Learning:  Based on prior experience, bring in documentation of your role in conducting a needs and assets analysis at the community level.   The documentation could include: a letter from a community group or organization describing your role, a copy of the original report submitted to the organization or community group, a copy of the research methods or tools used in the needs and resource analysis, and/or flyers advertising a community meeting where the information was discussed.   Submit a detailed outline describing this work experience to a faculty evaluator.

2.      Independent Learning:  A student who is interested in housing issues in the North End, learns about the range of issues in the community from local newspapers, interviews and attending meetings to address criteria 1-3.   For criterion 4, the student reads a set of materials on needs and asset assessment provided by an evaluator and designs plan to assess housing issues and resources in the neighborhood.

3.      Course: A student completes a CPCS course addressing the competency or an appropriate transfer.

4.      Field Project:  In a CPCS-sponsored field project, work as part of a team of students to assess the need for special transportation services for mobility-impaired persons in the Boston area.  This would involve, among other things, accepting responsibility for one or more elements of the needs and assets analysis, such as issue identification, problem definition, and/or research design.