The community needs assessment is a tool to help your Chapter understand and document the needs of your community. It’s an important planning tool, and can also be a valuable resource in your advocacy efforts.
Here are some of the advantages to community needs assessments:
- To learn more about what your community needs are. A good needs assessment can supplement your own sharp-eyed observations and experiences. It can give you detailed information from a larger and more representative group of people than you could get from observation alone.
- To get a more honest and objective description of needs than people might tell you publicly.
- To become aware of possible needs that you never saw as particularly important or that you never even knew existed.
- To document your needs, as is required in many applications for funding
- To get much-needed local data to support you organizing efforts when advocating or lobbying for your goals. You can turn the assessment into a report you release to the media and local education decision-makers.
- To make sure any actions you eventually do get involved in are in line with needs that are expressed by the community.
And also for two more reasons, which are less commonly understood, but very important:
- To get more community support for the actions you will soon undertake. That's because if people have stated a need for a particular course of action, they are more likely to support it. And, for the same reason:
- To get more people actually involved in the subsequent action itself.
You may agree with some or all of these reasons. But you may still have concerns or objections. That's perfectly fine. The Chapter Programming Manual has an excellent resource on developing community needs assessments. Reading that resource now may help you better understand how valuable community needs assessments can be for your Chapter.
What you can do
Here are some of the ways your Chapter can conduct a community needs assessment:
- Conduct Surveys and Questionnaires: For example, asking 100 local LGBT youth to complete the GLSEN School Climate survey will give you a clear picture of the needs of LGBT youth in schools. See the sample surveys and the how-to resource on conducting needs assessment surveys in the Chapter Admin and Policy Change sections of the password-protected Chapter Intranet.
- Review Existing Research: There is a lot of research already out there, and you can summarize several studies and make conclusions and recommendations for your local community. See the research summaries in the Statistics section of the Resources area of the GLSEN web site
- Grade Your Schools: Grade area school districts based on how they measure up on the following questions:
- Protects students from discrimination: The district has a written policy specifically protecting students from discrimination based on sexual orientation.
- Protects staff from discrimination: The district has a written policy specifically protecting staff from discrimination based on sexual orientation.
- Addresses name-calling and harassment in the School Safety Plan: The district has a written statement addressing name-calling and harassment based on real or perceived sexual orientation in its Safe School Plan.
- Supports curriculum mentioning sexual orientation: The district supports curriculum related to policies mentioning sexual orientation. Examples of these inclusions occur in subjects such as Health, History and English.
- Supports and offers professional development opportunities for staff: The district supports and offers professional development opportunities addressing sexual orientation and/or gender identity.
- Supports extracurricular student activities and clubs: The district allows and officially recognizes the formation of Gay/Straight Student Alliances and other in-school support networks whose goal is to address homophobia and heterosexism in the school.
- Interview Community Leaders: Meet with leaders of youth-serving and education organizations and ask them what they think, based on their experience, are the community’s needs.
This list is only a partial list designed to help you develop your chapter’s list of interviews and interview questions. You are encouraged and expected to create your own list.
Consider the following organizations:: LGBT community centers; Other community centers; Community foundations; LGBT youth organizations; Other youth organizations; Teachers unions; LGBT papers; The PTA; LGBT-friendly Churches; PFLAG; AIDS service organizations
Be sure your list includes: Students/Youth; LGBT educators and administrators; People of color; Non-educators; Community activists; Transgender people; Parents; Business leaders
Sample questions to ask in your meetings (in no particular order). Because you will probably have more than one person having these 1-1 meetings with community leaders, GLSEN strongly recommends that the questions be standardized, to ensure the most accurate results.
- In your experience, what are the most pressing problems LGBT youth experience in schools?
- What do think GLSEN’s priorities should be in the coming year(s)?
- In regards to homophobia in schools, what work should be getting done but is not?
- What’s a winnable goal for GLSEN this year?
- Can you introduce me to someone who could help us with [PROJECT/GOAL]?
- What work to end homophobia in schools is going well and should be continued or increased?
- Who else should I be meeting with to make sure GLSEN understands what the community needs?
Always include recommendations! Conclude the needs assessment with a series of recommendations, and use these recommendations to advance your Chapter’s work in the community. One of your finding may be that teachers seldom respond to anti-gay epithets in their classroom. A recommendation, then, could be “Mandatory teacher training on stopping anti-LGBT harassment.” You can use the report and recommendation when you make your case for teacher trainings to the school superintendent.
