REACH helps clients lay a solid foundation for their work by assisting them to gather information about the current conditions and resources that exist within a target area.  REACH believes that a comprehensive and meaningful needs assessment is an essential first step before effective planning, implementation, or evaluation can occur, and allows clients to:

• Define the extent of unmet needs or the demand for services
• Learn more about suspected needs and uncover new ones
• Identify populations and/or neighborhoods with the most pressing needs
• Assess existing resources available to address the needs
• Obtain baseline data that can be monitored for changes over time
• Assess community readiness to respond to the needs
• Develop and articulate a clear and convincing set of problem statements

REACH designs custom needs and resource assessments that match the scope of client efforts.  We can concentrate on specific, localized areas within communities or widen the scope to assess the needs within larger areas such as counties, regions, or states. We work with clients to determine what data are currently available, what data still need to be collected, and how best to proceed.

Our multidisciplinary team can mine large public data sets to identify relevant indicators and detect trends, work with client databases to extract service delivery figures, or create new data gathering strategies to obtain the information most valuable to clients.  Once the relevant data are collected and analyzed, REACH will create a high quality report that includes attractive and easy-to-understand graphs, charts, and maps, produced with the latest graphic design applications.