Community Assessment

Community Assessment is a process to identify community's needs, resources, challenges and points of actions for future interventions. Needs means the gap between the present situation and desired situation of community. Resources means skills, ability of its people as well as material resources available e.g. unused area of community hall. Challenges means, issues which will be faced during the intervention and points of action means prioritizing the issues, on which action should be taken first. Generally, Community assessment is done by organizations, which want to work with community for its betterment. Assessment is done before coalition and to decide whether the coalition between the organization and the community will work or not. Before starting any work with community, it is very essential to understand the community. Leaving few exceptions of homogeneous communities like tribal, most communities are heterogeneous and have complex structure of a bigger society. So, if understanding about the community is not comprehensive, working with it will be more difficult. To understand the community comprehensively, we need to perform community assessment in detailed way.