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- SEXUAL ASSAULT AWARNESS MONTH
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This section of the Sexual Assault Response Team (SART) Toolkit explores building a SART, including community readiness, building relationships, and planning for success. SARTs may not be right for every community, or they may be right in the future but not the present. Anyone seeking to develop or champion a SART should carefully consider the ability of the agencies and the community to support or sustain a SART.
There is no one path to forming a SART. Often there is one person, or group of people, referred to as a “SART champion.” These champions ignite a spark that encourages others to come together and improve the community-wide response to sexual assault. This SART champion could be from any discipline. Meetings might start between representatives of two disciplines who realize they would be more effective with increased collaboration among additional disciplines. SARTs might form on the heels of numerous meetings with false starts when a champion recognizes the need for ongoing communication and follow-up.
You may be your SART’s champion. Whatever the spark in your community, this chapter outlines essential phases of SART formation. While there is no order prescribed, missing any step can lead to difficulties down the road. SARTs in formation might use this section as a roadmap, while SARTs in revival or readjustment might revisit these steps to determine what building blocks they missed.
One step to forming your SART is building a planning team to bring together agencies and organizations that respond to sexual assault or survivors of sexual assault. Planning teams may be small and informal or large and formal. Ideally, planning teams include agencies that are part of larger systems, culturally responsive agencies, and agencies that have the authority to change systems. [1] SARTs are strongest when individuals from several agencies are willing to commit the time and effort required to form a team and lead interagency sexual assault responders through the planning process. SARTs should consider members’ ability or willingness to attend meetings and perform subsequent SART-related duties. [2]
Planners should be aware it can take years of work for the group to become an effective team. Such was the case of the Albuquerque Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) Collaborative, where advocacy, law enforcement, and prosecution members worked for three years to guarantee SAFE participation at the hospital level. [3] The Value of Persistence describes the process of developing a SART in the U.S. Virgin Islands that included multiple false starts.
Many successful SARTs have years of working together, false starts, challenges, and opportunities that influence the relationship-building necessary for a group to become an effective team. SARTs must be built on a foundation of respect, understanding, and trust, which can be cultivated into a long-term sense of ownership for the SART’s plans and purposes.
When forming a planning team, it is important to know which service providers and agencies may have already been engaged in discussions to start a SART. Many communities have had a SART, both for short and long periods of time, or have struggled to form a SART. Learning from those who have attempted to develop a SART in your community in the past could provide valuable insight necessary to begin the work again. Planners could work with a technical assistance provider to make a list of questions to ensure all useful information is gathered during these conversations. These conversations are relationship-building opportunities.
While SARTs are considered best practice as a response to sexual assault, it is essential your community assess its readiness for a SART and ensure that specific conditions are present. Potential stakeholders in the SART can conduct a community needs assessment; understanding the community’s readiness will allow the planning team to tailor their strategy to form a group that your community is willing to accept and support. This may include gauging the community’s perception of sexual assault [4] to understand what myths, misconceptions, or barriers are present.
If a community believes in a specific myth, a regular pattern of offense is normalized, prominent individuals partake in sexual abuse, or the community is healing from a recent high-profile case, part of forming the SART may be first addressing those issues with the community and potential SART members. SARTs may well receive the necessary buy-in by providing leadership and clear messaging during difficult circumstances.
Many organizers experience false starts when first trying to establish a team. In other communities, SARTs are a natural outcome of increased informal collaboration between stakeholders who experience the benefits of improved relationships and larger systems improvement. Assessing readiness will allow those interested in a SART to focus their efforts where they are most useful.
Investing the time to clearly lay out a collective vision, mission, and goals improves clarity of purpose. Your SART’s ability to meet sexual assault victims’ needs, through all interactions with all systems involved, is highly dependent on having representatives from each system come together to develop common goals. Although your plans for creating a SART may start with inspiration from an individual, agency, or small group, the development of a team is ideally a collaborative process with core agencies (advocacy programs, law enforcement agencies, sexual assault forensic medical examiner programs, crime labs, and prosecution) serving as equal planning partners.
Members may come together with big goals, hopes, and dreams of creating a victim-centered system but can burn out before those dreams become reality. SARTs that are willing to put in time at the outset, building and planning for sustainability, are more likely to last beyond the initial spark of inspiration.
Potential members should review your agency’s willingness and ability to participate on a SART, including its policies, procedures, and best practices. In preparing to represent an agency and discipline at SART meetings, potential members should seek to understand your individual and agency competency around sexual assault. Individual members or agencies who are experts in their discipline but are not as familiar with sexual assault cases can consult technical assistance providers for more information about SART roles and responsibilities from a discipline-specific perspective. Individuals or agencies can also contact other potential SART members as resources.
In a community with low reports of sexual assault or low prosecution rates, an individual member or agency may not have specific experience with sexual assault. SARTs are intended to increase expertise and competency for all members, especially in cases where individual members or agencies seek to improve their specific competency around sexual assault. Agencies may have concerns about participation that need to be addressed before joining a team.
The support of appointed or elected leaders and influential community members is essential to your SART’s success. Each member agency enters into an interagency agreement, committing to follow an agreed-upon protocol for the handling of sexual assault cases across disciplines and systems. It is not unusual for the momentum to start a SART to come from a front-line worker. However, for sustainability, an agency’s leadership must commit to working collaboratively on sexual assault cases.
Planning members should assess victims’ services already present and services that may be lacking. Many SARTs will begin with little or no funding. Utilizing or improving upon already existing services is more cost effective than attempting to create or re-create everything from scratch. Including victims’ voices in meaningful ways during the early planning stages will help ensure that your SART’s design is culturally responsive, practical, and relevant to victims’ needs and community safety concerns.
Other considerations for assessing the availability, quantity, and quality of services in your community can be explored through the following questions:
For more information on gathering agency or program data, see the Community Needs Assessment section of the SART Toolkit.
Resources are anything the planning team can use to create and sustain a SART. Resources vary from community to community, as do strengths and challenges. The planning team should assess resources that are available to them as well as resources they need and do not currently have, such as —
Many individuals can be instrumental in cultivating a SART. For example, the team concept could start when a —
As a voluntary association of community and government agency employees, a SART’s geographic service area is usually set by the individual members’ jurisdiction or catchment areas. “Jurisdiction” is a legal term that refers to the power or authority to make decisions over a person, location, or subject matter. Jurisdiction for government actors is usually set out in state statutes and is often, but not always, based on geographic boundaries. “Catchment area” is a term often used by social service agencies to describe their service areas.
A city police department’s jurisdiction to exercise its law enforcement powers is generally limited to the city’s geographic boundary. Similarly, a court’s authority to hear and decide cases is limited to certain geographic areas. Understanding jurisdiction is essential for SARTs, as service providers are likely to be in overlapping but inconsistent geographic areas.
SARTs must also clearly understand their service area. Your SART may be able to define its jurisdiction based on the geographic areas of service of individual members, unless determined by state statue. SARTs may include multiple law enforcement agencies, community-based crisis centers, multiple courts and hospitals, and in this way, a SART’s jurisdiction may be a local community, state, territory, tribal land, campus, military installation, national park, or multi-city, multi-county, multi-state, or multi-SART region.
Establishing your SART’s jurisdiction does not indicate legal authority to act in that area, but rather an intention to develop consistent, victim-centered responses to sexual assault across the government and non-government agencies that cover that area.
Your SART must then develop an understanding of how to work within your service area, especially when the circumstances of a sexual assault involve multiple jurisdictions or concurrent jurisdictions. Clearly establishing who from the team should respond to reports of an acute sexual assault is essential to ensure victims receive immediate services. Uncertainty about an appropriate SART response can lead to delays in services for victims and stalled criminal investigations.
Your SART can proactively address complex issues before they arise by: assessing state laws; creating local and regional multidisciplinary protocols, guidelines, and memorandums of understanding (MOUs); and establishing regional partnerships with medical, legal, and advocacy agencies that victims may contact. The Victim Rights Law Center provides Jurisdiction-Specific Guidelines: Privacy Laws Impacting Survivors, which provides a starting point for researching common privacy issues as your SART establishes its jurisdictions and how agencies will work together.
Performing a community assessment allows your SART to anticipate specific needs of your community and understand the unique service areas for each potential member on a SART. During a community assessment, SARTs may also recognize the need to adjust their jurisdiction, such as reducing the geographic area if a neighboring community has a SART, is expanding, or if a neighboring SART expresses interest in merging. SARTs may also recognize that a large part of their law enforcement’s jurisdiction contains a hospital or crisis center that is not a member of the SART and invite or include those agencies in SART meetings.
SARTs may also identify resources slightly outside of their initial jurisdiction that could enhance services to victims, or an important new SART member may be identified. Responding to these findings may increase a SART’s service area and expand victims’ access to services.
When defining jurisdiction, SARTs can consider the sources of current reports as well as where sexual assaults are most likely occurring. What are the specific difficulties for victims seeking to report sexual assault? SARTs should understand the challenges victims may encounter when navigating multiple service areas, identify jurisdictional concerns for interagency collaborators, and assess the legal considerations for incorporating tribal, local, state, and federal regulations into a SART model.
Regardless of the jurisdiction’s geographical size and makeup, it is important to consider all its law enforcement agencies, hospitals, and community advocacy programs, in order to coordinate a response among them.
Rural jurisdictions may be challenged by geographic isolation, limited access to services, the need to travel large distances for a single response, minimal funding for specialized services, privacy concerns for victims, and widespread economic depression.
If a region has limited resources, you may want to identify agencies and facilities in neighboring areas with which you can join to develop a regional response, or consider partnering with other victim service organizations in the area. For example, a shelter for battered women with spare office space might be temporarily designated for sexual assault forensic exams.
A survivor’s ability to travel might be particularly problematic in rural areas. Rural hospitals may not have trained medical-forensic examiners, leaving delivery of the exam to emergency room staff. In those circumstances, a hospital may prefer to offer a referral to another facility that has a SAFE on staff, but that facility can be a considerable distance away, even in another state. In these situations, SARTs must consider how to address transportation issues for victims, as well as the multi-jurisdictional issues raised in the following sections.
Urban SARTs may need to coordinate services among incorporated and unincorporated portions of a city, determine how to establish partnerships with agencies that have limited free time due to high caseloads, work to coordinate services among multiple service providers, or streamline the SART activation process. Sexual assaults may also occur in an area other than where the victim reports the assault, such as a victim who lives in a suburb but is sexually assaulted in a nearby city. Anticipating assaults and reports over multiple criminal justice system jurisdictions will help ensure proper investigation and referral of cases for prosecution will occur.
The SART of Brevard County, Florida provides a good example of how to address jurisdictional issues. The SART streamlined its services through an agreement with the Salvation Army, which is the designated domestic violence shelter. The Salvation Army offered space at its new facility for performing medical forensic exams for victims countywide. Previously, these exams had been performed at six busy hospital emergency departments in the county. To ensure proper oversight, the local public health department agreed to provide a medical director for the new exam facility.
Tribal nations’ SARTs continue to see challenges specific to jurisdiction. SARTs can encourage collaboration between federal, state, and tribal responders to ensure that American Indian/Alaskan Native victims receive comprehensive, victim-centered, culturally relevant response and services. [5] For a more through discussion of Tribal Jurisdiction please see the Tribal Jurisdiction section in the American Indians and Alaskan Natives section of the SART Toolkit.
Sexual assaults will occur that require SARTs to work with agencies beyond their SART membership. SARTs with multi-jurisdictional concerns need to develop cross-jurisdictional guidelines to ensure a consistent response among medical responders, legal responders, and advocates, regardless of where victims first seek services. Failure to identify neighbors and understand their roles and responsibilities as well as relay information about your SART’s services could lead to gaps in service delivery for victims.
In cases of multi-state jurisdiction, federal jurisdiction, or when working with agencies that are not part of your SART, members must gather information about state statutes, health department regulations, and federal grant certifications within each jurisdiction to ensure the SART’s activities and services comply. SARTs should also create protocols or guidelines that honor each state’s laws during interstate collaborations. Protocols, working agreements, and MOUs between jurisdictions help ensure that services will be available immediately when victims contact any given agency or organization.
SARTs likely to engage in multi-jurisdictional considerations —
When developing your protocol or guidelines, consider the following:
One example of a successful multi-jurisdictional SART is the Memphis Sexual Assault Resource Center, which borders a tristate area that includes eastern Arkansas, northern Mississippi, and western Tennessee. Victims who are sexually assaulted in regions bordering Memphis are transported to the center, which is a designated site for sexual assault medical forensic exams. Center advocates are informed of each state’s victims’ rights laws, and forensic nurses travel between states to testify as experts or provide information on the forensic evidence collected.
Despite the jurisdictional lines, differences in state laws and statutes, and distances between agencies, victims receive continuity of care from the first call for help to the offenders’ sentencing because of this multi-state collaboration. [7]
In this section, the SART Toolkit provides guidelines for processes that SARTs can use to understand the needs and strengths of a community to begin building a culturally responsive local plan for reducing, preventing, and responding to reports of sexual violence.
These processes include —
Links to additional resources will be provided to assist SARTs in conducting other needs assessment activities, such as —
Story 4: Assessing the Victim/Survivor Experience
Story 4: Assessing the Victim/Survivor Experience by Sexual Violence Justice Institute at Minnesota Coalition Against Sexual Assault, 2011. Retrieved from LINK.
Community needs assessments enable SARTs to listen to and learn from the communities they serve. Gathering information from multiple sources ensures all voices and experiences are considered in decision making. This includes survivors who receive services and those who do not, professionals who provide services, and community members who provide services in addition to, instead of, or in collaboration with professionals.
Most often, service providers assess community needs by gathering data from and talking with other professionals. Although useful, this only provides insight into people seeking formal services. This is problematic in sexual assault as only 5 percent to 20 percent of victims report to law enforcement, and the majority do not seek mental health services or medical care. [8]
A community needs assessment can access broader demographics, especially members of marginalized groups: men, people of color, persons who identify as LGBTQ, people with mental illness, people with substance abuse disorders, incarcerated people, teens, and members of faith communities that strictly prohibit dating or sex among unmarried people.
If done well, assessment activities can build trust and knowledge within a team, and connections between service providers and community members. Assessment activities have the potential to —
Involving survivors and community members in the assessment process can help establish trust and support between your SART and the community. Collaborating with community members for this assessment values the voices, experiences, and leadership of people whom most SART members might never hear from in your day-to-day work. [9] By listening, learning, and following up with the needs and concerns addressed through assessment, your SART can show its commitment to addressing sexual assault in the community you serve.
Each step of the needs assessment process holds the potential to gather information while strengthening your SART’s ability to collaborate and connect with the community. To achieve this, your SART will need to consider —
Conducting a needs assessment may require the expertise of an outside consultant for such tasks as selecting needs assessment processes, developing surveys, hosting focus groups, analyzing data, or writing a final report. Other tasks, such as scheduling groups, managing logistics, paperwork preparations, note taking, etc., may require staff time.
Consultants may be seen as a neutral, unbiased party and demonstrate to the community that your SART is making an investment in a fair process.
Whenever possible, SARTs can pair consultants, volunteers, or interns with service providers to enhance the skill and understanding of the local professionals, capitalize on relationship growth across systems and within communities, and respond to the needs of participants who may disclose abuse or violence.
Having a written plan for your community needs assessment is essential to success. This will assist your SART in organizing efforts to gather and understand information from many sources while reducing the likelihood that major obstacles will unexpectedly surface. When forming the needs assessment plan, you should keep the points described below in mind.
In newly formed collaborations or in SARTs that are new to assessment, it is imperative that your members discuss and agree on each step of the process to define what data will be gathered, how it will be analyzed, written and reviewed, how it will be shared with others, and address any concerns that may be present at this stage.
Listening to Our Communities: Tools for Measurement (PDF, 4 pages)
NSVRC developed this resource that provides a list of tools, including advantages and disadvantages.
Readiness Assessment Survey (PDF, 4 pages)
SARTs can use this assessment from the Sexual Violence Justice Institute at Minnesota Coalition Against Sexual Assault to determine whether they are ready to collaborate.
The guidelines below may aid in strengthening the team’s ability to collaborate and form trusting relationships with diverse groups of community residents during the assessment process. Consider copying the following guidelines to discuss and adapt to meet your needs with the SART and members of the assessment team:
Example: If a service provider says they served 100 people, what does that mean? When they use the word “served,” how do they define this? And who were the 100 people? Adults, teens, or children? What are their age ranges for adults, teens, and children?
If examining neighborhood-level police data, consider how police practices, community conditions, and beliefs about sexual assault may impact the data. Example: Few reports of sexual assault in some neighborhoods may reflect the residents’ lack of trust in seeking help from law enforcement rather than a lack of sexual violence occurrences. High rates of reporting may reflect higher levels of trust in law enforcement, the presence of strong advocacy, or cultural accessibility of rape crisis centers.
An important first step in many needs assessments is gathering existing demographic and agency data to create a community profile. This report or profile describes the locale and its residents and consolidates information on sexual violence services. Gathering data about both topics may or may not be a simple, straightforward task. If these reports do not exist, it is important to develop them. If your community has existing demographic profiles or community reports on sexual violence, it may be easy to add information from a few additional resources to create a descriptive picture of the community. Many SARTs or service providers have created these for grant applications.
Consider gathering data so that it might serve many purposes. Review state and federal funding requirements to see what types of information are required in their proposals. Is this information that can be gathered during the needs assessment process? As ongoing evaluation?
It may be helpful to gather demographic and agency data using some of the same definitions found in state and federal surveys so that local information can be compared to other jurisdictions. Consider using definitions for race, gender, and forms of violence from the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, which contains state information for some areas.
Basic demographic data may include information about —
This website provides vital information on a yearly basis about jobs and occupations, educational attainment, veterans, whether people own or rent their home, and other topics.
An Economic Geography of the United States: From Commutes to Megaregions
This article explains “megaregions,” commuting patterns that connect multiple areas.
The National Intimate Partner Sexual Violence Survey
This survey provides national and some state information on domestic and sexual violence.
The U.S. Census Bureau: Quick Facts
QuickFacts provides statistics for all states, counties, and cities and towns with populations of 5,000 or more.
Agency data may provide insights into three different groups of people: those who received services, those who sought services but were unable to be assisted, and people who did not seek services. Some programs track reasons why people sought services and were unable to be served. Knowing this may help to identify unmet needs and obstacles to accessing services to improve the community’s sexual assault response.
Common reasons for being unable to serve include —
Additionally, faith groups and agencies serving diverse groups of people may know about sexual violence for which few survivors seek services. Consider including them in focus groups or listening forums, interviews, and other assessment activities.
Needs assessment information can be gathered for the development of a single community profile or report, and it can form the basis for the development of data collection that can be collected and analyzed periodically to evaluate the impact of policies, programs, and initiatives over time.
To understand the scope of sexual assault services in your jurisdiction, request agency data from:
Sharing data about clients and services provided can be a difficult task within your SART and when reaching out to community service providers who may not be members of your SART. There can be spoken and unspoken concerns about what types of data will be collected and how it will be used. If not addressed, these concerns can block or limit your SART’s ability to gather data and understand existing services. Explaining the needs assessment plan and asking about their concerns may be helpful to ease fears, as could modifying the plan to address their concerns.
Many assessment challenges can be avoided or minimized by following the guidelines above and having a community needs assessment plan in place.
When requesting agency information —
This section of the SART Toolkit will offer guidelines on hosting focus groups or listening forums with victims and community members.
What term to use? Refer to this process with a word or phrase that fits your purpose and community. “Focus group” suggests a research study or fits a population that understands and functions well within a formal structure.
“Listening forum” may be a better choice when meeting with victims or community members where your primary goal is to hear from people. A listening forum is a facilitated discussion based on a list of prepared questions. Unlike a focus group, the listening forum’s discussion may get into unexpected areas as participants present information that was not anticipated. It is an opportunity to learn things that you did not know you needed to know.
Listening forums with survivors or community members are beneficial when you —
As one element of a community needs assessment, listening forums have the potential to help communities determine a course of action once a problem or issue has been identified or to uncover problems or issues that may not be known or understood. [10] Listening forums and focus groups have similar processes but different outcomes; where focus groups are research-based, listening lessons are facilitated with more flexibility in response to the group’s needs.
Community members may or may not have a personal experience with sexual assault. Some may be survivors. Some may be family members, friends, neighbors, or co-workers of a survivor. Consider following and adapting the general guidelines listed below to provide safety and confidentiality with this group of people.
Talking with survivors is an essential piece of a community needs assessment. It offers the victim feedback on their experience in receiving services, support to identify obstacles to victim accessing service, and notes ways to improve the local sexual assault response. These forums can empower survivors as they see a way to help others. Survivors may benefit from seeing that sexual assault happens to others, reducing any sense of shame, isolation, and internal blame.
Adapting the general guidelines below will increase the likelihood that these forums will be a positive experience for survivors and professionals. Supporting survivors in these discussions is the first priority.
When preparing for, conducting, and debriefing from a listening forum with survivors or community members, consider the following concerns:
If you attempt to stifle someone from disclosing, group members may take this as a sign that you do not really care, and this may influence the way they talk about you and your organization with others in the community. If someone is very distressed, you can recognize that what happened to them was terrible and provide them with the opportunity to meet with the advocate in another area to receive immediate support.
If a personal disclosure is made, it is important to watch the reactions of other participants. If anyone else appears distressed, the facilitator can check in with them during or after the meeting.
SART members are often involved in creating forum questions, inviting participants, and organizing and facilitating listening forums. Preparing for and hosting one or more listening forums is a time-limited task that can be assigned to the entire SART or to a smaller workgroup.
Community agencies who may not be active members of the SART may assist with recruiting attendees, providing a space, and facilitating forums.
When selecting facilitators, look for people who are skilled at talking and listening. Optimally, they will also match the diversity of the forum participants, especially in language and culture. Consider how their professional role may impact the forum discussion. For instance, in some communities, having a police officer as a facilitator or even a note taker, may squelch the conversation if the group distrusts police. Conversely, it may give the group an opportunity to talk with a police officer in a different way and provide the officer with an opportunity to learn directly from the community they serve. Decide what works for your community and adapt to the forum group’s needs.
Basic staffing needs include —
You may wish to have a separate summary of listening forum insights and recommendations. The listening forum summary may describe how and when a forum was held, the focus, the numbers and kinds of participants, and trends in responses as distinct responses. The final summary will be added to the demographic and agency data on sexual violence to create a community needs assessment report.
Like every other step in the needs assessment process, data analysis can be conducted in a way that builds trust and understanding within your SART. You can increase collaboration by —
When writing the final report —
Designing Accessible Events for People with Disabilities and Deaf Individuals
Vera Justice Institute’s Center on Victimization and Safety developed four tip sheets to assist in planning and implementing accessible meetings that address the needs of all people, including people with disabilities and Deaf people.
Language Access & Interpretation: Resources for Policy, Research, Services and Advocacy (PDF, 17 pages)
This document from the Asian & Pacific Islander Institute on Domestic Violence provides guidance around language access, translation, and technologies for interpreting.
Learning from Survivors: The Beginning, the Middle, and the End of Community Assessments (multimedia, 1:15)
This webinar from Praxis International discusses listening forums and focus groups with survivors.
LGBTQ Youth: Voices of Trauma, Lives of Promise (multimedia, 13:22)
This video by the National Child Traumatic Stress Network gives voice to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, or Questioning (LGBTQ) youth who have experienced trauma, including sexual assault.
At the Table: Hosting Listening Forums to Talk About Sexual Violence (PDF, 3 pages)
This resource includes eleven important considerations when hosting a listening forum.
At the Table: Hosting Listening Forums to Talk About Sexual Violence by Jo E. Johnson, 2018. Provided with permission.
At the Table: Listening Forums with Professionals, Survivors & Community Members (PDF, 3 pages)
This resource provides several key reasons to host listening forums, as well as their benefits.
At the Table: Listening Forums with Professionals, Survivors & Community Members by Jo E. Johnson, 2018. Provided with permission.
Community Profiles: Who Are Our Survivors of Sexual Assault? (PDF, 3 pages)
This resource describes a community profile as the people who live in, work in, and visit a community.
Community Profiles: Who Are Our Survivors of Sexual Assault? by Jo E. Johnson, 2018. Provided with permission.
Use the Community Toolbox to get help taking action, teaching, and training others in organizing for community development. Find help assessing community needs and resources, addressing social determinants of health, engaging stakeholders, action planning, building leadership, improving cultural competency, planning an evaluation, and sustaining efforts over time.
Listening to our Communities: Assessment Toolkit
This toolkit focuses on key tools and skills for conducting community assessments to strengthen services for sexual assault victims.
Looking Back – Moving Forward: A Program for Communities Responding to Sexual Assault
This workbook provides guidance on performing a community needs assessment, writing protocol, developing training, and more.
OVC Technical Assistance Guides: Guide to Conducting a Needs Assessment
This online guide will help you conduct a comprehensive needs assessment of your community, target populations, and the services available to them. It will also guide you in using the results of your needs assessment to further develop, refine, and implement your program.
Sample Community Needs Assessment Report (PDF, 4 pages)
The information in this report was gathered in a community-based needs assessment conducted in the Cumberland County, Maine, area during December 2009 and January and February 2010. Project partners include Family Crisis Services (FCS), the Portland (Maine) Police Department, and the South Portland (Maine) Police Department.
Developing Culturally Responsive Approaches to Serving Diverse Populations: A Resource Guide for Community-Based Organizations (PDF, 30 pages)
The Hispanic Resource Center developed this resource guide to help community-based service programs more easily find and access available resources on cultural competency to better serve their targeted populations. Second, the resource guide aims to help community-based organizations (CBOs) attract funders who often require evidence of culturally relevant programs.
Shining a Light on “Hidden” and “Hard-to-Reach” Populations
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) Strategic Prevention Framework (SPF) is a five-step planning process to guide the selection, implementation, and evaluation of effective, culturally relevant, and sustainable prevention activities.
The effectiveness of this process begins with a clear understanding of community needs, based on close examination of epidemiological data. This resource includes guidelines on reaching out to five populations: LGBTQ individuals; veterans and military families; people who identify as Hispanic or Latin@/x; American Indians and Alaskan Natives; and people with disabilities.
Center for Changing our Campus Culture
This center is an online clearinghouse of information for colleges and universities. Resources include information about sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence, and stalking.
Conducting Strengths and Needs Assessment (PDF, 32 pages)
This document was created to help grantees of The Services, Training, Education and Policies to Reduce Domestic Violence, Dating Violence, Sexual Assault and Stalking in Secondary Schools Grant Program (STEP Program) develop and conduct a strength and needs assessment to examine assets and gaps in prevention, intervention, and responses to domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking to facilitate the development of effective and comprehensive programs for students.
Department of Defense Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office
This office oversees sexual assault policies for the Department of Defense and develops and implements prevention and response programs.
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