Growing Home is a social enterprise that provides transitional jobs and job training to participants by employing them in organic agriculture at their two urban and one rural farm sites. This project assisted Growing Home in setting up a tracking database by collecting contact and other baseline data from past graduates and following recent graduates for three months post-program to determine outcomes.
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This report focuses on the role that community-level organizations have had, currently have, and could have in setting regional agendas. Data for the report come from a representative sample of 49 community-based organizations in the City of Chicago, the Illinois counties of Cook, DuPage, Will, and Lake, as well as the Indiana counties of Lake and Porter.
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Anawim Center (currently known as the Kateri Center), a Native American spiritual and cultural center under the Office of Evangelization and Catechesis of the Archdiocese of Chicago formed a research collaboration with the Center for Urban Research and Learning (CURL) at Loyola University Chicago and the Office of Research and Planning of the Archdiocese of Chicago for a needs assessment study to determine the whereabouts, needs, and interests of the Native American community in Metropolitan Chicago.
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CURL worked with the National Neighborhood Coalition (a coalition of national and local organizations concerned with building the capacity of neighborhood-level organizations throughout the U.S.) to collect survey data and conduct focus groups that gave NNC an understanding of current and emerging policy issues at the local level. CURL worked with NNC in presenting these results at a Neighborhood Development Trend Summit in Washington, DC in June 2003.
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The following is a community needs assessment guide designed by CURL researchers to aid organizations in identifying community assets and potential concerns. The guide briefly details the steps of the Concerns Report Method beginning with the planning phases and ends with the implementation of action committees and the utilization of findings from the needs assessment.
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The project documented existing local, community-based projects in an effort to include these voices in the larger smart growth development discussion. It examined how the benefits of regional economic growth might be used more effectively to address pressing social problems in these communities and the broader region.
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