Title
Recommendation to Accept the Social Service Human Relations Board Community Needs Assessment Report. (Community Development 10061831)
Body
To: Honorable Mayor and Members of the City Council
From: Jennifer Ott, City Manager
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The City of Alameda's Charter assigns Social Service Human Relations Board (SSHRB) the responsibility of assessing and responding to the social service and human relations needs of the City of Alameda (City). To fulfill that responsibility, SSHRB has periodically surveyed Alameda residents to determine the scope of the community needs and to evaluate and publicize resources to meet those needs. The last Community Needs Assessment (CNA) was presented to the City Council in June 2018.
Over the last year, SSHRB members have volunteered hundreds of hours in the preparation of the 2023 CNA. The CNA is intended to inform the City Council of Alameda residents' needs. The CNA will also help community-based organizations document community needs in funding applications and will give granting agencies important information to help guide their giving programs.
BACKGROUND
At its March 24, 2022, meeting, SSHRB finalized an alternative methodology for collecting and compiling the Community Needs Assessment compared to the methodology used in previous years. Most notably, SSHRB decided to base the CNA on secondary data and public comments presented at SSHRB meetings instead of conducting the community survey that had been done in past years. All of SSHRB's changes to the CNA methodology are summarized below:
* Eliminate previous survey format-The 2012 and 2017 CNAs relied on community surveys posted on-line, distributed by email, and made available in hard copy at various locations in multiple languages throughout the City. SSHRB considered the limitations of this approach in producing a statistically representative sample of Alameda's population. In addition, the phrasing of the survey questions left ambiguity wheth...
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