Listening to Our Communities: Assessment Toolkit

Advocacy programs are dedicated to serving all survivors of sexual violence across lifespans, across their healing journeys, from all communities in their service area. This is often a daunting challenge. By listening to your community’s experiences, hopes and concerns, you will gain new insights and deepen your understanding of your community. This understanding can help you to design outreach and services that meet the needs of survivors of sexual violence. This toolkit provides key tools and skills for conducting community assessments including a sample interview guide, a guide for focus groups, tools for measurement, and analyzing data. This toolkit should be used in conjunction with the Picturing Your Program Toolkit, which provides guidance on conducting an organizational assessment.

Coalitions play a central role in supporting advocacy programs to provide services to survivors of sexual violence across lifespans, their healing journeys, and from all communities. Coalitions offer context, information, and support to advocacy programs by having relationships across the whole state or territory. Coalitions empower advocacy programs to make the best decisions for themselves that are rooted in the needs of their community. This toolkit provides key tools and skills for conducting community assessments including a sample interview guide, a guide for focus groups, tools for measurement, and analyzing data. You can use this toolkit to support individual advocacy programs in your state or territory and/or you can use it to conduct a statewide/territory-wide assessment to identify gaps and how those gaps can be addressed. This toolkit should be used in conjunction with the Picturing Your Program Toolkit, which provides guidance on conducting an organizational assessment.

Administrators have the responsibility to fund advocacy programs and coalitions to conduct assessments in order to ensure that all survivors of sexual violence across lifespans, healing journeys, and from all communities are being meaningfully served in your state or territory. This toolkit provides advocacy programs and coalitions with key tools and skills for conducting community assessments including a sample interview guide, a guide for focus groups, tools for measurement, and analyzing data. You can help by providing funding for programs and coalitions to use this toolkit.