Your Guide to a Community’s Needs Assessment

A useful and efficient needs assessment starts with a few key variables: stakeholders, target areas, objectives, and limitations and challenges. Public health pundits will tell you that you should first start with a logic model (“every good project starts and ends with the logic model”) and while I partially subscribe to that belief, here’s the quick and easy way to isolate and identify what you need to know about a community before a collaboration.

1. Identify the appropriate community for the project. Think of this like speed dating, you want to get to know as much as you can about a community and its organizations as quickly as you can.

2. List out the key elements — after you identify your general goal, figure out the basic, but relevant, details.

3. Investigate key stakeholders. Stakeholders are the most important part of community-based partnerships. You want to know every cook that is going to be in your kitchen.

4. Consider ALL of your limitations and challenges, including time and financial constraints.

5. Finally, weigh your objectives and your aims, both in the short term and the long term, to come up with a plan that actually works in practice, not just theory.

To make this easier for you, here is an example of a needs assessment for Mattapan, MA. We conducted this months before approaching Mattapan Food and Fitness Coalition (MFFC) to partner with them. It was integral to our understanding of the community and helped us shape our goals and our eventual project.

EXAMPLE

Mattapan, Massachusetts

Key Target Areas:

1. Cummins Highway

2. Blue Hill Avenue

Key Stakeholders for Cummins Highway:

1. City of Boston Redesign Project — anticipated $24 million budget

2. Vision Zero Task Force

3. Disabilities Commission

4. Walk Boston

Key Stakeholders for Blue Hill Avenue:

1. Cummins Highway Redesign Plan/Committee

2. Boston Transportation Department (BTD) — Blue Hill Bus & Mattapan Square Projects

3. Community Members

Key Elements:

1. Age-Friendly

2. Installation of New Street Lights

3. Rebuild Road

4. Safer & Accessible Crosswalks

5. Prioritize Advance Go Boston 2030 Goals

6. Reduced Speed Limits

7. Reduce Crosswalk Distances

8. Increase direct access to public transportation

9. Addressing key accident-prone intersections in the redesign

10. Embrace inclusivity, decrease isolation, and encourage healthy behavior 

Limitations & Challenges: 

• Age-friendly design only focuses on the elderly — what about young children?
  While Mattapan has a higher population of elderly (13%) compared to Boston (11.5%), census data shows that Mattapan remains a key “cradle of youth” with a 22% youth population. Additionally, Mattapan has been characterized as a family-friendly neighborhood, specifically appealing to larger families due to larger homes. If the city plans to truly implement an age-friendly design that encourages the elderly to walk, bike, and congregate, should that not also apply to the burgeoning youth population? Accidents (unintentional injuries) are the leading cause of death in children, with 1 in 8 children killed in car crashes being pedestrians in 2020. 

Key Considerations:

1. Traffic signals that “rest in WALK”

2. Improving crosswalk lighting using flashing lights

3. Increasing pedestrian safety habits in pediatric populations

Initial Aims of Mattapan Campaign:

1. Collecting community-based data through Mattapan-based grassroots organizing

2. Engaging with families with children as a critical and vulnerable population that is not prioritized in the plans

3. Create community-specific messaging to improve safety in crosswalks in Mattapan