The Washington County Community Foundation has initiated a new project aimed at identifying broad community needs, as well as the specific needs of individual nonprofits, on an ongoing basis.
Community Snapshot, a web-based community needs and resource database, is one of the outcomes of an independent study conducted in 2021 which evaluated the WCCF’s engagement with donors, community leaders, and nonprofit partners. The results of that survey were abundantly clear in that constituents were looking to the WCCF to lead the effort to assess community needs and to help identify nonprofits working to address those needs.
“Unlike other needs assessments which are often filled with excessive amounts of data and sometimes confusing charts and graphs, the Community Snapshot was designed to be accessible to the average reader, while still being both thorough and comprehensive,” remarked Betsie Trew, WCCF President & CEO. “And rather than assessing community data that is already being assessed by other groups, we have secured partnerships with these groups to share their existing data.”
The Community Snapshot website will be organized in seven broad categories which align with the Foundation’s funding areas as follows: arts & humanities, community improvement & economic development, education, environment & animal welfare, health & fitness, human needs, and religion & faith-based. Visitors to the website will get a panoramic view of our community’s overall needs through concise narratives on these seven broad focus areas, or they can zoom into the current, most-pressing needs of a particular nonprofit serving our area. Nonprofits who are interested in being included are encouraged to register at www.communitysnapshot.org.
To provide for input from a wide cross-section of community stakeholders, focus groups are being convened in these seven areas. The focus groups will convene in the CARE Education Center at the WCCF offices in Eighty Four. Community members who are interested in serving on one or more of the focus groups are encouraged to register by clicking here.
Once the full version of the Community Snapshot website launches, the WCCF will promote it to individual donors, institutional funders, community leaders, government officials, and the general community. To assist in coordinating this effort, the Foundation has engaged Rob DeOrio of DeOrio Strategies Group.
“To the best of our knowledge, never before has a comprehensive community-wide needs assessment been conducted for Washington County, nor has there ever been a centralized location for community data,” said Trew. “Once it is fully operational, the Community Snapshot project will provide an ongoing web-based resource to inform our community leaders and donors about the overall needs of our community as well as the specific needs of our local nonprofits.”