The purpose of this assignment is for you to apply your assessment skills towards completinga simple Community Needs Assessment of your field placement site. An accurate andcomprehensive Community Needs Assessment is essential towards developing successfulinterventions at a micro and macro level.You will develop a 5-7 page Community Needs Assessment of your field placement site inwhich you will discuss a need in relation to a specific population (e.g. long term care for olderadults; child care and single working parents; domestic violence and immigrant women).InstructionsBegin by thinking about how and where you would get community information aboutthe neighborhood in which your field placement agency is located. You might find thestatistical informational available at www.census.gov helpful in obtaining the most recentinformation from the 2010 U.S. Census. Find out if a needs assessment has been conducted orif there exists demographic data already gathered at your field placement that will help youbetter the neighborhood or city in which you are working. If demographic data already exist,review it carefully.Once you have identified the need, population, and arena; prepare a focused 5-7 page paperthat does the following:1. Provides a description of the population and an overview of the related need. Thediscussion should be guided by the frameworks in Netting, Kettner, McMurtry &Thomas’ Chapters 3 and 4. (2-3 pages)2. Examines the relationship between the need and the population within theparticular community arena. The analysis should be based on the frameworks inNetting et al.’s Chapters 5 and 6 regarding communities. (2-3 pages)3. Concludes with a brief discussion of the general changes you contend need to bemade so that the population can meet their needs, and identifies the type ofcommunity system (e.g. mechanical, organismic, morphogenic, factional,catastrophic).
