New Orleans Community Needs Assessment

There are many steps involved with conducting a community-needs assessment. For this Assignment, you are going to examine the steps that are necessary to conduct a community-needs assessment in your own community. You are then going to consult existing data sources to discover what the needs are in your community and develop a plan that you would utilize if you were really going to collect data from community members, organizations in your community, and so on. Finally, in this Assignment, you are going to write a Sample Needs/Problem Statement that would be appropriate to appear in a grant proposal using the information you discovered from your secondary data sources.

The paper needs to include the components listed below.

• Discuss what, if anything, you already know about the needs in your community.
• Design needs assessment questions that you want answered in order to provide you with more information about the needs in your community.
• Consult secondary data sources to find out information about the needs in your community, the demographics or your community, and to answer the questions that you designed. Discuss which data sources you utilized, and the information that you discovered. Consult your readings for examples of secondary data sources that you can refer to for this section of the Assignment.
• After learning about some of the needs in your community, you should explore and then discuss whether or not there are any nonprofit organizations currently addressing the needs that you discovered.
• Based on information learned from your exploration of the secondary data sources, assess the role that the information you gathered would play with regard to the community-needs component of a grant proposal.
• Develop a plan for collecting data from community members. This plan will not actually be carried out, but it should be a discussion of what would occur if you were really doing community-needs assessment. In this section, be sure to discuss what types of data collection techniques you would utilize (for example focus groups, surveys, interviews), and justify why you are using these particular techniques. You also need to discuss whom you plan on gathering information from (for example, individuals in the community, other nonprofit organizations, police officers). The information that you learn from reviewing secondary data sources related to the needs in your community may help guide how you develop your plan for this section.

Your Assignment should reflect professional writing standards using proper tone and language. The writing and writing style should be correct, accurate, and reflect knowledge of conducting a community-needs assessment, and the role that this plays with regard to grant proposals. You should include a minimum of four reputable references in your Assignment. Your Assignment should be 3-4 pages in length, not including the title page and a references page.