The United Way of Southeast Missouri and the Community Caring Council sent out a community needs assessment by email to Cape Girardeau County residents as of Feb. 16.
The two organizations partnered back in 2005 for a similar assessment, and now, ten years later, are conducting it again.
The survey samples 2,500 households to determine what components of the community are working well and where there is room for improvement.
Nancy Jernigan, executive director at the United Way, said the survey should take about ten minutes to complete. Questions are split up to span many common concerns including housing, food supply and access to reliable health care.
“We are trying to find out what we can do to help,” Jernigan said.”We’ll use this information to determine if the strategies we have in place to address these critical community issues are still valid and relevant, and if not, we’ll have to shift a little bit, that’s what it’s all about.”
Jernigan said the number one issue in 2005 was lack of available public transportation, but with a more established taxi and bus service now in the area, she expects housing to jump up higher on residents’ lists.
“Affordable housing -- not much has changed in that area in our community,” Jernigan said. “There are a lot more people struggling now than were ten years ago, I do believe, and affordable housing is a real issue.”
Community coordinator Kay Azuma from the Community Caring Council said she expects to see more economic concerns.
“The fact that a lot of individuals in our area are not self-sufficient economically,” Azuma said. “People’s income has not kept up with inflation and I think more and more people are finding it hard to live within a budget.”
Jernigan said when the results came back in 2005, there was a total of 11 top issues. They took those to group meetings and received additional feedback on those original responses to narrow down to a focus on four. From here, results were put out to the community.
“We were doing it for our purposes so that we could understand what the highest and best use of United Way resources were as far as creating lasting change in the community to improve the community and the strength of families in the community,” Jernigan said. “We hoped other organizations were going to look at it and do the same thing -- determine how they can use their resources to address the most critical needs.”
Jernigan said compared to the first time conducting the assessment, the questionnaire is much shorter. Although, she said she thinks what’s being asked of community members this time around gets deeper to the heart of the matter.
“You have to get the questions right or you won’t get the answers that you need,” Jernigan said.
Both Jernigan and Azuma expressed some anticipation about the survey being online. However, they said if the results are not representative of the demographic as whole, the assessment will be readministered through a mailer.
The survey itself remains anonymous, but a separate registration form follows where participants can enter to win an iPad Mini.
“People might think, ‘Uh oh, that’s gimmicky,’ but we wanted to build an incentive into it to really catch people’s attention,” Jernigan said. “I encourage people to look for that subject line, take ten minutes to fill it out and register for that free iPad.”