Assessments and Reports

Nothing About Us Without Us: Assessments, Reports, and Tools Built With Communities, Not Just For Them

Before you can build something better… you have to understand what's actually happening. Not what you assume is happening. Not what the last report said was happening. What's happening now, for the specific people you're trying to serve, in the specific context they live in.

That's the work we do when an organization comes to us for an assessment, a needs report, or an advocacy resource.

We go and find out.

Then we help you figure out what to do with what you learn.

CASE STUDY: Community Health Needs Assessment: Columbia Gorge Health Equity Collaborative

When the Columbia Gorge Health Equity Collaborative needed to conduct a federally-mandated Community Health Needs Assessment across eight publicly-funded healthcare organizations in rural Oregon, they came to us to manage the process from start to finish.

That meant stakeholder interviews, focus groups with underserved communities, bilingual community surveys distributed in both English and Spanish, and ultimately a comprehensive final report with clear, actionable recommendations for each participating organization. The communities we engaged included monolingual Spanish-speaking residents, LGBTQ+ youth, indigenous community leaders, and rural seniors: groups whose voices are often absent from the very processes designed to serve them.

The result was a report that didn't just check a compliance box. It gave the Health Equity Collaborative a clear picture of where health disparities existed, where trust had eroded, and where resources could make a genuine difference.

Youth Needs Assessment: YouthThink of Wasco County

YouthThink serves young people in Wasco County, Oregon, a rural region where youth often feel invisible in conversations about their own futures. They needed to know what young people actually thought, wanted, and needed: about their community, their relationships with adults, and their sense of whether this was a place they could stay and build a life.

We designed and facilitated a listening process that went to where young people were, structured to invite real honesty rather than polished answers. What came back shaped a needs assessment report that gave YouthThink and its partners something concrete to act on, grounded in the voices of the youth they serve rather than assumptions about them.

Advocacy Toolkit: True Colors Recovery

True Colors Recovery is an LGBTQ+-focused recovery organization in Portland that received a grant from the Oregon Health Authority to build advocacy capacity within its community. They didn't just want a document. They wanted their members to be able to walk into a room with a state agency and know what to say and how to say it.

We worked alongside their team through three stages: first, building a foundation of community education around political organizing and how Oregon's policy systems actually work; then facilitating a process of discernment to identify the issues their community most urgently needed to address; and finally, developing the toolkit itself, complete with step-by-step advocacy guides, sample scripts, templates, and a training session to put it all into practice.

The toolkit belongs to their community now. That was always the point.

What We Bring to This Work

Whether we're conducting a formal needs assessment, facilitating community listening sessions, or building an advocacy resource from the ground up, a few things stay constant. We design engagement processes that reach the people who are most affected, not just the people who are easiest to reach. We synthesize what we learn into something clear and usable, not just a document that sits on a shelf. And we work alongside our clients, not ahead of them, so the final product actually reflects their community and their goals.

If your organization is sitting with a community you don't fully understand yet, or a mandate you're not sure how to fulfill, or a constituency that deserves better tools to advocate for themselves, we'd love to talk.