Understanding Community Needs and Assets: Tools and Approaches

May 15, 2020, 1:00pm - 2:00pm
Location: 
Zoom

Join the OSU Extension Learning and Organizational Development (LOD) Unit for a series of trainings on Community needs and assets from May 11-15.

Understanding Community Needs and Assets: Tools and Approaches

Identifying needs and assets in your community is the basic building block of program development. A need is a gap that exists between what is desired and what currently exists. Assets are those resources (people, skills, infrastructure, civic organizations, natural resources, and many more) that can be built upon to make life even better. Learn how to gather data about communities and how to make sense of that information to help you build better programs. 

Session Objectives:

  • Deepen understanding of approaches to community needs assessments and assets inventories
  • Explore sources of secondary data to help understand communities
  • Explore sources of primary information to help understand communities
  • Develop competencies in finding information
  • Learn about community development success stories

You do not need to register for any of these sessions. Simply show up and engage. Sessions will be recorded if you cannot make these dates and times. Log into this Zoom room for all sessions: https://osu.zoom.us/j/634938327.

Day, Date, & Time

Event

Instructors/Facilitators

Monday, May 11

1 – 2 p.m.

Getting Started with Community Needs Assessments

There are different ways to find out about community needs. You can access existing (secondary) data from sources such as the Census, Pew Research Center, Centers for Disease Control, National Agricultural Statistics Service, and many more. You can also collect your own data (primary) when necessary.  In this session, we’ll talk about how these two kinds of data, how we collect it, and the advantages and disadvantages of both.

Amy Elhadi, LOD

Brian Butler, LOD

Tuesday, May 12

1 – 2 p.m.

Listening to Your Community

Sometimes you may want to engage in conversations with people to find out what they think are the needs and assets of the community. To get a more in-depth understanding, you can conduct listening sessions, focus groups, and interviews. We will discuss these strategies and talk about writing open-ended questions, recording and taking notes, and some tools that are commonly used (and some that are not so common).

T McCoy, LOD

Debby Lewis, LOD

 

Wednesday, May 13

1 – 2 p.m.

I Listened … So How do I Make Sense of All of these Words?

What do you do with all of that information you collected? How can you make sense out of several people’s answers to your questions? Don’t worry. The process is called qualitative data analysis and it’s a lot like being a detective. During this session, we will talk about methods and strategies for analyzing your data (coding) and developing themes, tools used for analysis, and how becoming a “word-nerd” could help you better understand your community.

Amy Elhadi, LOD

T McCoy, LOD

Thursday, May 14

1 – 2 p.m.

 

Getting Started with Assets and Access-Based Approaches

A community may have a lot of assets, but not everybody in that community may have access to those assets. This session will include a demonstration of the “Inclusive Asset-Based Approach to Needs Assessment” tool.

Amy Elhadi, LOD

Friday, May 15

1 – 2 p.m.

Community Assets and Needs in Real-Time

The OSU Extension Community Development team works helps communities enhance their well-being and create social, economic and environmental conditions in which they can thrive. We will have some Extension-based examples of how programs and services have been created based on understanding community needs and assets.

Becky Nesbitt,
assistant professor
and educator, CD