How Community Based Surveys Can Spark Social Good?

"We can never get a re-creation of community and heal our society without giving our citizens a sense of belonging." -Patch Adams

Understanding Culture As Community Building:

It is becoming pretty evident that in order to build communities that succeed in improving conditions and solving issues, we must understand and appreciate the fact that there are many different cultures which establish relationships with the people outside their own cultures for strong alliances.

We must work together to bring the non-mainstream cultural groups as an active part of our community. The question arises why we should do that? Let’s find out the answers:

• We need a large number of people working together to build communities that are powerful enough to achieve a significant change. Once the cultural groups join each other, it will be easier to reach common goals than achieving goals on individual basis.
• Different cultural groups have their own strengths and perspectives which can play a vital role for the benefit of the community. A wide range of customs, ideas and opinions will provide better options to overcome problems and enrich community life.
• Once the different cultures are united, it will help us overcome the racial and ethnic issues that are still alive across the country. Such prejudice issues end up in misunderstandings, lack of opportunities, complexes and in some cases violence, too. Racial and ethnic conflicts drain the communities from their financial and human resources.
• Multicultural communities are great because they treat individuals more justly and believe in equality. For instance, if students belonging to different cultures are accepted and treated equally in a classroom, then it has been observed that they perform better in academics. It is because they associate well as part of the school community, stay motivated, and work harder to be successful in school.

Know Your Community:

In order to implement an effective and successful project for your community, you must know its strengths and weaknesses. You must take out time to learn about the issues in your community and then discover different solutions to prevent those issues from arising again.

There are several tools through which you can assess your community and get to know it in a better way. Those tools can be conducting a community survey, panel discussions, focus groups or scheduling different activities.

The need to assess a community basically arises in order to fulfil the 3 reasons mentioned below:

What To Look For?

In order to conduct survey to know your community profile, it would be better if you note down all the things that you want to know about it and keep on updating the data that you seek insights for. This isn’t a one-time assignment, but a task that could be repeated on different time intervals (depending upon your survey results).

Your area of interests should be:

• People in the community and the problems they face.
• Physical environment of the community.
• Access to government services.
• Lifestyle adopted within the community.

When the need of research arises, there should be a process that you must follow to find out the actual problems that lie in your community and brainstorm different options to come to a wise conclusion.

The community research can be carried out either before starting any new project or during the project implementation. The process chart shown above, is completed in different phases depending upon the completion of every single stage in the process. These research projects can be done by professionals but if you are working on a big and expensive project, it is better that you involve proper research team that can help you collect scientific data through different research methods.

Answers You Seek For Your Community

There might be some questions that you and your neighbors seek answers for. The questions could be such that would help you build a community with harmonious and healthy activities. If you think of your community as an ideal community what factors would you consider for the well-being of your community in the longer run?

Here are some questions for your survey that you can ask to make your community a better place to live in:

• Who lives in your community?
• What sort of relationships exist between different cultural groups within the community?
• What issues do different cultural groups have in common?
• What kind of differences are faced by people in the community?
• Is there enough financial aid from the government?
• Are all resources utilized equally?
• What sort of recreational activities are undertaken?
• How is the physical environment?
• How well the basic needs of the people are taken care of?

Perhaps by asking the above mentioned questions, you could help build a community that you hoped for. In order to fulfill goals for a better place to breathe in we must work unitedly and put away all our cultural differences.

Do you have any ideas in your mind that can help us bring a positive change in the places we live?