Reviewing Priorities
During the needs assessment process, you identified and prioritized the city’s needs. Now it’s time to create an asset map to accompany each of them. The asset maps will be used during the action planning phase as springboards for creative and innovative solutions to address your city’s critical needs.
The number of priorities is based on the capacity of each city to address these needs. A city may find that ten issues are important in the community, but it is able to address only the top three through the service plan.
To begin the mapping process, the asset mapping coordinator should create a committee to:
- Review the service initiative’s main goal, which is to develop a comprehensive service plan and coordinated strategy that engages citizens and established community partners to positively impact the areas of greatest local need.
- Review the needs assessment data, particularly those issues related to the priority needs, e.g. high school dropout rates, public safety, or foreclosures.
- Review the stakeholder analysis to ensure that groups most affected by priority issues are represented on subcommittees.
- Motivate stakeholders to participate on subcommittees for each of the priority needs.
When possible, committees should include members of the public, private business, philanthropic, nonprofit, and education sectors that are connected to the specific issue. Additional committee members should include members of groups representing citizens most affected by the issue.
