Capstone Component 1: Homeless population in Dallas Texas
Community Needs Assessment
For the first of three components, you will choose a local community and conduct an assessment of that community in relation to a social problem. Typically,
this is a community that is somewhat familiar to you and is limited to a city, county, or neighborhood level. For example, if you have identified a problem with
child hunger in your hometown, your assessment should seek to uncover how and why this is happening by conducting a review of the literature and collecting
and analyzing data on your chosen community, while also identifying existing resources designed to combat child hunger.
You will not be conducting a full community needs assessment; rather, you will be identifying a need through a preliminary review of local newspapers or other
relevant sources and talking with other human services professionals who live or work in the area. Your instructor is available to review sources and identify
ways to obtain information and navigate the system. From there, you will research what is out there, what is missing, what others have done to solve the
problem, and so on. This comprehensive evaluation also presents the opportunity for you to engage the community. In your evaluation, you will be required to contact appropriate individuals in the community, either directly or using the internet or the telephone, to interview them about the problem you have selected.
This does not fully meet the “fieldwork” definition, but it will require you to become involved with your selected community in some form and engage providers
and consumers.
Your community needs assessment should include the following sections:
I. Overview of Community and Problem: This section should serve as the foundation for presenting your community assessment and is your opportunity
to comprehensively describe the selected community and identified problem. Overall, it is important to include any information that is pertinent for comprehending the community and problem—it is up to you to establish a robust context for understanding and responding to the community’s need.
II. Gathering Community Information (Methodology): In this section, you will discuss your methodology for collecting the information about your
community and provide a summary of your findings. Your methodology will involve conducting a brief systematic literature review of your chosen community, the problem you identified in Milestone One, and other communities who have dealt with the same issue or problem. In other words, for
this section, discuss how you will collect the information and provide justification for your chosen method(s).
III. Literature Review: Using primary and secondary sources, analyze how the problem is being addressed in other communities. How prevalent is it?
Through a review of the literature, evaluate the social, political, and historical milestones and trends relative to the identified problem. You should also
review interventions that have been attempted in other communities and their success, or lack thereof.
IV. Needs Analysis: This section should include your analysis of the information you gathered on the community. This will provide the conclusions you have drawn from thinking about the findings you described in the preceding section. Based on your assessment of the community and comprehensive analysis
and evaluation of the problem:
• What is the magnitude of the problem in the community?
• What resources and interventions currently exist in the community?
• Provide a description of the impact the current resources and interventions are having on the population. Are they effective? Why or why not?
• What are the obstacles that exist in the community that prevent impacting or addressing the problem?
• Why is this problem one that the community needs to address? What are the demographics of the individuals affected by the problem? Citations/Formatting:
Your community needs assessment should be approximately 5–8 pages in length and should include the necessary elements that one would find in a professional needs assessment. It should include a title page, table of contents, bibliography, and appendices, if applicable. The information should be cited
according to the rules of the latest publication manual of the American Psychological Association (APA). You may include illustrations, photographs, graphs and
charts, and other non-textual materials as needed to support the needs assessment. These can be placed as an appendix at the end of the final paper or, if
appropriate, incorporated in the body of your paper.
