Organizations must continuously track changing community needs to ensure that their programs reflect current concerns. A needs assessment identifies significant issues that are not being well addressed, or emerging issues that are not being addressed at all. Such issues are also opportunities – documenting them helps organizations refine their programs and justify requests for new financial resources and other kinds of community support. In addition, organizations also pause to assess their own needs, in order to improve their internal operations.

Q2 recognizes that the word "assess" comes originally from a Latin term (assidere) that means to "sit beside." In conducting needs assessments, we sit beside our clients and community, immersing ourselves in their lives and understandings, to help determine what real needs are and how they might best be served.

Some previous Needs Assessments:

Rapid Ethnographic Community Assessment Process (RECAP) / Oklahoma State Dept. of Health HIV/STD Service
Associated Centers for Therapy, Tulsa, OK
Euchee (Yuchi) Tribe of Indians, Sapulpa, OK