Frederick County Community Needs Assessment

BNIA-JFI and the Johns Hopkins University Institute for Policy Studies created a human needs assessment for Frederick County Maryland. This assessment was created for the Community Foundation of Frederick County and will be used to expand the Community Foundation’s strategic grant making to ensure maximum impact and create benchmarks to assess progress over the next 10 years. This human needs assessment combines research and data with input from service providers, stakeholders, community leaders, and others to determine the areas of need that are most pressing. The human needs assessment covers all areas of human services within Frederick County but pays particular attention to the Community Foundation’s core priority areas: health, youth, and basic human needs including housing and jobs. The report identifies key components in the Community Foundation’s three target areas that can be addressed with strategic funding, collaboration among funders and service providers, best practices, volunteer efforts, and community involvement. The systematic needs assessment had three parts:

• A quantitative perspective on human needs in Frederick County;
• A qualitative perspective on human needs in Frederick County; and
• An analysis of the supply of services available to meet the identified needs and of gaps between supply of services and need for them.