Assignment #4—Assessing Program Needs
You are an independent management consultant working in Niagara County, NY. The local United Way has hired you to conduct an assessment of the general “needs” of the community through the use of social indicators data. Social indicators, such as those available from the US Census Bureau, are a valuable source of information for assessing such generic community needs. These data are especially useful insofar as they are often uniform and tracked over time.
Using the US Census or equivalent data (see the Needs Assessment Resources I have created), your assignment is to conduct a brief needs assessment for Niagara County. Think of this exercise as the initial phase of what would be a comprehensive community needs assessment for the County. Your specific goal is to identify the most pressing needs in the County and, of those needs, identify those that are most rapidly growing. In effect, the focus of your analytical attention is on current socio-demographic trends in the County that may translate into future “opportunities” for nonprofit organizations. Hint: to do this, you'll have to make cross-temporal comparisons (see lecture notes).
Write your findings in 2 double-spaced pages. Be sure to reference relevant data in your memo. This assignment is due at the start of class on the 26th of October.
To help you start your research, I have created a web site that contains the most important "social indicators" statistics: Needs Assessment Resources. Begin your investigation here.
To help you see what you're looking for, I have incorporated the general Census data for 1990 and 2000 for Monroe County in an Excel spreadsheet. You will want to compare the "relevant percent" columns for 1990 and 2000.
In addition, here are two examples of high quality memos of a previous semester's needs assessment that focused on Livingston County: