Resource Library
Discover Innovative Community Action Initiatives at Community Action Showcase!
The Center of Excellence is a national training hub, engaging Community Action Agencies coast-to-coast to share innovative, high impact strategies. This platform shines a light on Community Action success stories to inspire. Here you can access resources to strengthen services, build community outcomes, and create family and community change in your local area.
Community Needs Assessment Tool
This Hub acts as your entry into an online tool with multiple features that allow for the efficient use of data and mapping as part of a larger Community Needs Assessment process. Here, you can measure and visually represent the fundamental drivers of poverty in your community through an array of census data sets, a report generator, and a mapping tool.
Leveraging Partnerships in COVID-19 Response & Recovery
This brief highlights practices that local CAAs can engage in to establish new partnerships or collaborative relationships and describes some of the learnings from Capstone Community Action as they convened resources to assist families in crisis.
Delivering Human Services and Workforce Development Remotely
This webinar focuses on insights on best practices in facilitating human service and workforce development programs in response to COVID-19- both from an organizational perspective on how to support your staff, but also from a people perspective on how to support your customers. In each section, ICF discusses emerging research and creative strategies states are utilizing to adapt to a shifting human services and workforce environment.
Writing Your Community Needs Assessment
This webinar walks through an “annotated template” by the Partnership and NASCSP that can be used to assist with how to structure your community assessment. The webinar covers how to comply with the organizational standards, tips for data collection and analysis, and walk through suggested sections to include in your next assessment and how to organize them to ensure the development of a high quality report.
Peer-to-Peer Series: Effective Practices for Community Needs Assessments
This Organizational Standards Center of Excellence Peer-to-Peer webinar focuses on the community needs assessment process and final product, featuring a discussion from two CAAs on their community needs assessment process as well as real-life examples of their final community needs assessment reports. This session highlights comprehensive data collective approaches, alignment with ROMA, and how to meet and exceed Organizational Standard Category 3.
Community Needs Assessment Resource Guide
The execution of a regular Community Needs Assessment is a requirement for all CSBG Eligible Entities, and one of the nine category’s (Category 3) of the Organizational Standards. To assist with this critical activity, this resource guide shares key resources that have been curated to provide Community Action Agencies with comprehensive information and easy-to-use tools for each step of the Community Needs Assessment.
ROMA Next Gen — Conducting, Sharing, and Utilizing a Community Needs Assessment
This module is designed to support a local Community Action Agency as they conduct, analyze, and compile a comprehensive CNA. It is intended to guide and enhance the process and final result of the CNA, as well as how it connects to other agency processes. It will also touch on how agencies can share and utilize their CNA for decision making, community partnerships, advocacy, grant writing, and planning
Virtual Tour of the CNA Online Data Hub through the Engagement Network
This webinar is co-hosted by the Partnership and the Center for Applied Research and Engagement Systems (CARES) and features a virtual tour of the new online hub where the Community Needs Assessment (CNA) Data Tool is housed. The tour provides an overview of the enhanced functionality for secondary data collection, highlighting updated mapping and reporting environments, easier access to data downloads, and streamlined navigation.
Peer to Peer Series: Program Level Data Collection and Analysis
This webinar features staff from the Garrett County Community Action Committee as they discuss how their use of data has led to success in their nationally recognized two-generation program, and provide valuable insight for all levels of Community Action on how to get the most out of the data you collect.
CSBG T/TA Resource Center
This website is a resource for the Community Action Network to access an array of information and assistance designed to support efforts in serving low income families and addressing the causes of poverty in local communities.
Community Needs Assessment Tool
The Community Needs Assessment (CNA) Online Tool provides a significant amount of the secondary data to help you along your way to complete community needs assessment with the click of a button. Through the tool you can measure and visually represent the fundamental drivers of poverty in your community through access to thousands of databases, a report generator, and a mapping tool.
The CNA tool allows you to select specific state(s) and county(ies) to be included in your report, allowing you to focus on your particular service area, as well as select particular data elements to include (such as employment, education, nutrition, etc).