Reducing Risk in a Community through Assessment

When it comes to community risk reduction, taking community inventory can help neighborhoods identify their needs and put themselves in a better position to create a stable environment. As the Compassion Capital Fund National Resource Center (2015) states, “In order to effectively serve a community, it is important to understand the community” (p. 4). The problem is that understanding a community and identifying its needs can difficult, as there are often so many of them to remember. That is why using a strategic approach like the community inventory and needs assessment can help organizers better track the state of a community and provide the basis for adequate understanding.

The value of conducting and utilizing a community inventory and needs assessment lies in the work that it enables organizers to do: “The findings from an assessment will define the extent of the needs that exist in a community and the depth of the assets available within the community to address those needs” (Compassion Capital Fund National Resource Center, 2015, p. 4). What this means is that the community inventory and needs assessment not only looks at what a community is lacking in terms of requirements for safety and health; it also looks at what the community has that can help it to fulfill those requirements. Moreover, once this understanding of what needs and assets exist in the community, it “can be used to strategically plan and deliver relevant, successful, and timely services” (Compassion Capital Fund National Resource Center, 2015, p. 4). The goal in this process is to find gaps that exist in a community where its needs are not being met and to see how those gaps affect the community’s stakeholders. For example, if a community is suffering from a high rate of high school dropouts, a community inventory would reveal that and indicate that one of the community’s pressing needs is to find a way that will help students stay in school so they can graduate. Another gap that might turn up in a community inventory could be the finding that elderly persons are living longer but lacking the funds need to cover their cost of living, such as medical care, medicine, assisted living costs, and so on. The needs assessment would indicate that the community needs to find a way to support its senior citizens in a more effective manner.

Identifying a community’s needs is something that impacts all people in the community—not just a single segment or population. In a community, everyone is connected even if it does not first appear evident on the surface. If dropout rates are high in the local high schools, the rest of the community will experience that burden in various social, economic and political ways. If senior citizens are struggling to make ends meet, the rest of the community will suffer as well via the same social, economic and political channels. This is because in a community there is no such thing as real isolation. Every segment impacts another segment. This is why the community inventory is taken—so as to identify segments that are in need that can have their needs satisfied by the assets that are held by a community in another segment.

A community inventory and needs assessment is not always about looking for problems that need fixing. It is also about looking for opportunities to just simply make things better. In other words it offers a way to reduce risk in a community. This is especially true for non-profit organizations like the Rotary Club: “By taking time to learn about your community, you can discover the most relevant opportunities for projects and maximize your club’s ability to make a meaningful impact” (Rotary, 2016, p. 1). Conducting a community inventory allows for stakeholders to unite and to pool their talents and experiences so as to achieve a common goal. As Rotary (2016) notes, “doing an assessment also helps you build valuable relationships and encourages community members to actively participate in making lasting improvements. It’s a critical first step in creating trust, community ownership, and sustainability” (p. 1). That level of community involvement serves as an occasion for stakeholders and members of the community to meet one another, grow as a community, and develop skills to ensure that positive work and contributions can continue on into the future. In this sense, the community inventory and needs assessment acts as a preventive measure—especially when it focuses on identifying assets that can be used to make improvements before situations actually become so dire that needs outweigh the assets that are on hand.

Therefore using the community inventory and needs assessment to take preventive action is another way in which this method brings value to a community. But there are others as well: the community inventory and needs assessment can also be utilized to improve the mental health of community members. As Wolf (n.d.) shows, mental health can be improved through the addition of green spaces to a community. Using resources like Park Score (2017) or other various online tools, stakeholders and organizations can find ways to identify the level of green space that a community has. If a community has a low green space score, for instance, community leaders and stakeholders could develop a fund that would support the introduction of more parks and green spaces in the urban areas. This would facilitate good mental health, as Wolf (n.d.) and other researchers like Grahn and Stigsdotter (2010) have shown. Without doing the community inventory and needs assessment, however, stakeholders and community leaders would not be aware of the ways in which mental health can be supported. That is the value of the inventory: it gives one the tools with which to assess situations, see what can be improved—issues like mental health for example. Then it looks at the assets, at what a community has to offer that can be utilized to address that need. If a community has parks a green spaces, the community inventory and needs assessment could match the two together—the need and the asset—to help solve a problem: community leaders could institute park days or free bus passes for urban area people to get to parks if they are far away. The point is that community inventory and needs assessment helps stakeholders to understand the issues that are impacting the community and identify the resources that it possesses to make positive changes that will address the issue and bring about an effective solution.

In conclusion, the community inventory and needs assessment is a tool that enables community members, organizations, leaders all stakeholders to take stock of itself, fix problems and reduce risk. The tool gives them the ability to examine every facet of the community, determine where issues are, where improvements could be made, and what assets that community possesses or has access to that could be utilized to meet those needs or make those improvements. Without taking such inventory and assessment, leaders, organizers, members and stakeholders can have no idea of what potential or problems their community has or is facing. This is why the tool is so important and has so much value: it provides a way for information to be gathered and understanding to be achieved so that evidence-based decisions can be developed and implemented to help communities, grow, prosper and reach a level of sustainability that will keep them going strong well into the future.