Hello – Thank you for contacting us! That’s great to hear that you’re working on a project for your Master’s. It sounds like you might need to do some sort of needs assessment, if just for your own purposes, to determine what project might be helpful to your community. Since you’re not being commissioned to conduct a formal needs assessment, this can be fairly informal to help you figure out what your focus may be. Check out the following chapters and toolkits regarding needs assessment on the Community Tool Box. They should give you some ideas of where to start. In particular, I’d start by looking at any publicly available data on topics that interest you (e.g., poverty, substance abuse, crime, housing, etc.) and see where there’s either a trend in the wrong direction or your community is out of line with a comparison area (i.e., state, region, country). Here are the tools from the Community Tool Box. You can access them through the Table of Contents at /en/table-of-contents:
I hope this information helps. Best wishes in your efforts!
