By the end of Week 4, you are expected to have completed Step 1 of the Community Assessment Project and have been working on Steps 2 – 4 as found in the Community Assessment PDF. This week you will submit your progress towards completion of Steps 2 – 4 of the Community Assessment Project in the form of a rough draft. Include references at the end of your paper. You don’t have to have a title page or abstract. You can place your name, date, course/section in the upper right corner of this draft. Don’t worry about headers, but please use topical headers to organize your paper and the key information in the assignment.
Step 2: Decide to Go Solo or Collaborate
You might be wondering about Step 2 of the project at this stage. This project is meant to be done ‘solo’, meaning you aren’t working with other students or having any other folks with direct involvement in the actual assessment and finished project. However, I would like you to discuss the benefits and limitations you are having, or could have, by going solo. Discuss what you would be able to do differently if you could collaborate with other organizations, or community leaders, individuals, groups, etc. Aim for a page, no more for Step 2.
Step 3: Collect Data
For Step 3, you will be discussing your data collection plan, and then collecting data to answer the key questions you came up with in Step 1. In this step you are to refer to the Community Assessment PDF and use Appendix B: Worksheet for Creating a Data Collection Plan as your template for this aspect of the project. If you cannot copy and paste this worksheet directly into a Word document, that’s fine. Please simply replicate the different boxes/sections on your own – I won’t deduct points for formatting, just as long as you present the information required in the worksheet accurately and in a way I can assess it, and that you are sticking with APA formatting throughout for font, references, etc. You may end up using a few worksheets, which is perfectly fine!
Due to the nature of this project, I am expecting a bulk of your sources to be Secondary in nature. If you decide to use a self-created Primary Source then be sure to run that by your instructor before this due date. Appendix C: Locating Secondary Sources of Information found in the Community Assessment PDF will help provide tips on how to obtain secondary data sources. There is no ceiling to the number of sources you investigate and use in this project, however you must use at minimum 5 Secondary Sources for this project. I do not expect you to use Primary Sources at all – but again, if you do develop one, then run it by your instructor first.
The data collection in Step 3 will likely result in a lot of data and information about your community needs and assets. You are not expected to provide all of the data you found in this paper, but use it to inform your approach to Step 4. Step 3 should be at least 1 page double-spaced too.
Step 4: Determine Key Findings
You can analyze the data you collected in Step 3 to identify the assessment’s key findings in Step 4. Key findings serve several purposes:
They validate anecdotal evidence of community needs and assets (if you used a lot of self-created Primary Sources in your data collection you’ll see this).
Highlighting significant trends found in the data collection process.
Revealing differences across segments of the community
The key findings can be organized into categories to help summarize the data. When you separate your key findings from one another, you could use them more effectively when planning your response. Common key findings categories used in community assessments include strengths, gaps, opportunities, and challenges. For examples, see the Appendix D: Determining Key Findings Worksheet in the Community Assessment PDF. You will use the categories that are found in this form to guide Section 4 in your project.
For this section you will share at least 3 key findings from the data you collected, and then identify them as strengths, gaps, opportunities, and challenges. In your at least 1 page double-spaced summary, you will also want to provide an explanation for why you chose the labels that you did for your key findings.
