Have you heard???

Monday, 15 August 2011 17:44

Have you heard that the Community Foundation is finishing its county-wide human needs assessment?  Yes, the results of the needs assessment and the Community Foundation’s plans to address some of the identified needs will be announced on Monday, August 29 at 10:00 a.m. at the Delaplaine Visual Arts Education Center.  The public is invited and we hope to see you there! (Please click here to R.S.V.P.)

But in the meantime, you may be wondering what a needs assessment is.  A community needs assessment does just that – it assesses the needs of a community by combining research and data with input from service providers, stakeholders, community leaders, and others to determine the areas that are most pressing.  

For our needs assessment, we wanted to pay particular attention to the areas of health, youth, and basic human needs.  Focus groups were held, community leaders and service providers were interviewed, nonprofits were surveyed about services provided and gaps in services, and the public was asked for its opinion.  Additionally, census tract data was studied, other studies’ data was considered, and population projections were made.

Why did the Community Foundation undertake such a huge project?  When donors ask about the most urgent community needs, we don’t have a solid answer.  Some groups have sponsored studies which were more marketing focused and did not address gaps and overlaps in services and access to services by geographic area.  In short, these studies did not provide the solid, unbiased answers that donors want and the Community Foundation needs.

So what did the Community Foundation do?  We hired the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance of University of Baltimore, with Johns Hopkins University, to conduct our needs assessment which is research based, used professional techniques, looked at gaps in service and created benchmarks to see if future Community Foundation grants are making a difference. 

This huge project is made possible through the generosity of the Ausherman Family Trust, the Delaplaine Foundation, PNC Bank, and United Way who are our funding partners. 

Please join us at the Delaplaine Visual Arts Education Center on August 29^th to hear about Frederick County’s human needs assessment report and the Community Foundation’s plans for its new strategic grantsmaking programs to respond to some of these needs.  We hope that you will share in our excitement about this new initiative that will award necessary funding that is For Good. Forever. For Frederick County. 

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