Community Needs Assessment

A community needs assessment is a systematic process for identifying, documenting, and prioritizing the unmet needs of a community or population in order to plan programs, allocate resources, and justify funding. It draws on multiple kinds of evidence — statistical indicators, what people say they need, the services they actually seek, and comparisons with other areas — and a guiding typology, such as Jonathan Bradshaw's four types of social need, helps assessors recognize that 'need' is not a single, self-evident quantity but a judgment that depends on whose definition and which standard is applied.