Community Needs Assessment: Scan
We are midway through a year-long, citywide needs assessment of people living and working in Newark to determine the city’s most pervasive unmet needs, as well as untapped resources and un-integrated efforts. During the first phase of the project, we looked very broadly at identifying Newark’s critical issues that are insufficiently addressed. We interviewed about 50 key civic and community leaders, surveyed over 500 Newark residents, collected and mapped existing research and data. The results of the community survey are here.
Community Needs Assessment: Understand and Broker Solutions
During the second phase of our Community Needs Assessment, we plan to drill down deeper in certain areas that emerged from the scan phase. Some priority areas where we detected unmet need and feel the Center can be instrumental in finding solutions include: workforce and economic development, individuals’ and organizations’ access to information about available services, and police and community relations. We are engaged in further research and program development within these priority areas, gathering input from a broader sample of the population through open community forums, citywide surveys (block by block), and focus groups; and develop collaborative solutions through maximizing resources and talents already here in Newark and also identifying best practices with promise from other cities. For a complete list of our 2010 Focus Areas and initiatives, click here.
This project is supported in large part by Living Cities.
Other Projects
The Center’s Youth-to-Youth “Know Your Rights” Training program is designed to promote youth civic engagement and leadership development for Newark youth. With support from the Black United Fund of New Jersey, this project will offer 10 Newark high school students an opportunity to learn about civil rights and community-police relations and then train other Newark youth. Pairs of students will each conduct two trainings, for a total of ten trainings reaching an estimate of 200 Newark youth. By giving Newark youth tools to address the issue of police-youth relations in a constructive, appropriate manner, the “Know Your Rights” training program will empower young people to stand up for their rights, will educate them on how to interact with law enforcement in a positive and pro-active manner, and will help to ease tensions between the Newark Police Department and the Newark community at large. To learn more about how to apply, please contact caroline@newarkchange.org.
Another community engagement & empowerment project is the Center’s Newark Immigrant Civic Education (NICE) program, through which, with support from the Western Union Foundation, will provide opportunities for several immigrant communities in Newark to learn about local government and how to effect change in their city. If you are interested in partnering with us to host a NICE series with your community group, please contact farha@newarkchange.org.
We are also continuing to work on several initiatives that Executive Director Laurel Dumont played an integral role in developing prior to founding the Center. These include working with the Newark Municipal Court, the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, and the Center for Court Innovation on the implementation phase of the Newark Community Court, and with Volunteer Lawyers for Justice on the Newark Reentry Legal Services (ReLeSe) program.
