How do exactly know and understand what the problems facing our community are? The simple answer to this questions is do a community assessment. Well what really is a community assessment. Through the past week, I had the opportunity to be part of an advanced community assessment process at the Drug Free Communities Grantees meeting. It reminded me of several things. 1. It is important to define the community of the coalition; 2. Coalitions should take responsibility for everyone in their defined community. 3. Engaging in a community assessment.
1. Definition of the community of the coalition. Is the coalition a community of place, interest or experience. These three distinctions are so vital to how we will interact with individuals and groups and the levels of interaction. Many coalitions are defined by place, geographic boundaries. When this is the case do we truly understand the entire community including its sub-communities and other outside influences? We should name all of the communities in our communities to better understand what is important to them and what their values are.
2. Responsibility. Probably the most significant way coalitions differ from direct service programs such as those who go into schools to provide a curricula is who they take responsibility for. While the program who works with sixth graders in a school may be concerned about what other kids are doing or what the community is doing, they only have resources and the ability to directly affect those sixth graders. Coalitions seek to not only represent their entire community, as defined by the coalition, but to engage in initiatives that take this into account. This is the reason you see coalitions such as The Partnership focuses on initiatives that involve systems and organisations that have a broad reach. We focus on community change involving capacity building, service delivery, and policy change. It is these items that begin to be able to reach the necessary levels in order to affect population level change (i.e. 30 day use among all high school kids)
3. Paul Evensen said that you cannot do a community assessment from behind a desk. True community assessments take people into the community, all of the pieces and parts that make it up. If the coalition focuses on a county, than all parts parts of the county must be taken into consideration central city, suburbs and rural areas. We must not leave out those who are traditionally under served or those who are under served because there is a perception there is not a problem in their community.
These are all things that we must think of when we speak of a community assessment and when we do one. So much of what we do is based upon only quantitative data, with limited qualitative data, and many time our qualitative data does not come from those who provided the quantitative. While this seeks to provide a complete picture it really falls short, especially since the quantitative tells the what and the qualitative tells the why.
On another note there are some other blogs that focus on coalitions across the country. I encourage to check them out the first one is the Community Anti-Drug Coalition's Blog http://prevention.typepad.com/cadcaforumblog/, Charleston Substance Abuse Coalition http://csac-chad.blogspot.com/ and the Missouri Youth Adult Alliance http://myaapreventuad.blogspot.com/2006/11/northland-coalition-receives-national.html
As always happy reading.
1 comment:
Whew! There's a lot of perspectives to a really good community assessment! Since I work with technology to support community change, your comments about including the "whole" community make me think of the connection between the numbers (data) and the images that help us tell a more complete story. I wonder how many of us have technology at our fingertips (literally) that could help us tell our community story better and we yet we are so accustomed to preparing our reports with words that we often don't even think about other ways? A digital camera or a cell phone camera can serve as a tool for capturing images that help tell the story. A video camera kicks it up a notch. A digital recording using an iPod or MP3 player (podcast) kicks in another perspective. Like the story of the blind men and the elephant, there are many perspectives on community. How many ways can we think of to tell our community story?
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