Once every 75 minutes, a pedestrian is struck and killed by a vehicle on a U.S. road. Another 15,000 pedestrians experience a devastating injury in a road crash each year. Not everyone is impacted equally by this— the casualty toll falls disproportionately on people living in under-resources neighborhoods.

In 2023, we partnered with the Mattapan Food and Fitness Coalition to learn more about community members’ experiences with navigating their neighborhood by foot. Check out our findings and future directions here!

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 subscribe to that belief partially, here’s the quick and easy way to isolate and identify what you need to know about a community before a collaboration.

We obviously take for granted the safety we may have, as drivers enclosed in a hunk of metal more than anything. But the streets are like any complex system, with many moving parts. It only takes one second to change your life or somebody else’s. Of these many crashes that happen, 1 in 6 who died were pedestrians.