This module’s portion of the project is as follows:
(1) Select a community for assessment, and (2) Write an overview of the community, its description, history, demographics, and needs. This will form the foundation of your community assessment.
The community i chose is Haitian Immigrants in South Florida
The Full Assignment
The purpose of this assignment is for the student to develop skills to assess communities’ assets and needs in a specified, geographically defined community. The assignment requires students to assess the environment as oppressive or supportive for positive personal and community change. Students become aware of how socially and economically disadvantaged/marginalized communities often experience limited access to needed services and resources. Based on previous knowledge gleaned from assignments one and two, students understand how the social service delivery system is designed to best serve the needs of at-risk, marginalized communities, though often facing environmental constraints.
In addition, this assignment requires students to design a plan create a service delivery map to reduce or eliminate the identified needs. The Project will list the community’s agencies and their services, and will identify their gaps in services, together with any impediments to service delivery, such as poor transportation, costly fees, wait lists, etc. The community assessment and service delivery map affords beginning social work students the opportunity to engage in the process of assessing identified marginalized communities’ services, resources and strengths as well as gaps in resources and services.
Through this assessment process, students gain increasing awareness of the importance of social workers’ roles in identifying environmental stressors, social problems, and social policies that can impede clients’ healthy social functioning. Students begin to understand the complex relationship between the process of defining social problems, their causations, and the formulation of social policies and programs to address these problems.
Specifically, the student will
Identify community and its needs
Design a service delivery map
Conduct a gap analysis – Where are they lacking access to resources
Assess how social welfare policies in that area are affecting delivery of services
Review policy structures that have resulted in marginalization (e.g. redlining, food deserts, etc.) – identify the relevant structural / policy gaps and the connection between these gaps and human rights
Use anti-racism, diversity, equity, inclusion, and trauma-informed lens to assess how social welfare policies address the delivery of services and advocate for services that advance human rights
Write a policy brief that will be sent to the appropriate public official(s) synthesizing the gap
