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Step Two: Evaluate and Prioritize the Needs of Your Community
Once your collaboration has made preparations for the planning process, members should examine, evaluate and prioritize the needs that were identified in your needs assessment and the goals and objectives in place in your collaboration. You will, undoubtedly, have identified and strategized around quite a few needs in your assessment process. At this point, you will have to figure out where to focus your resources, as that will be a major, limiting factor. In addition, when creating priorities for the work, the collaborative team should reference the mission and vision statements for guidance and consider the feasibility of each plan.
Establishing Priorities
In order to best set the priorities for your work, your collaboration should collect the information from the needs assessment and schedule time to address the following areas:
- Does this address something in our mission or vision statements?
- How does it fit with our goals?
- How do we fill the need?
- What is the strategy for doing this?
- What is the best practice for addressing this issue?
- What resources would be necessary to realizing this need?
- Who would work on this project?
- How much time would need to be dedicated to it?
- Is fulfilling this need an urgent matter?
- What would be the effect on the community if this need was not met?
- Is it feasible to address this need given this information?
Once you have done this exercise for each need articulated by the needs assessment, your team can determine the best method for making choices about which projects to take on. The choices may be made clear from this exercise; most likely, you will need to spend quite a bit of time evaluating and prioritizing the needs of your community. It may be practical to consider creating subcommittees to break up the work and then coming back together to make final decisions.
However you decide to address the needs and decision-making process, it will be very important to do this work as a team and with the mission of your efforts in the forefront. The number of and the area of issues you choose to address should depend on the time, resources and goals of your collaboration as well as the needs of your community.
