Previous Projects:

Working Towards Self-Healing Community Through Community Assessment

Project Lead: Mary Lou Schmidt

Project Intern: Fauzia Waqar

Description: Assessment to determine barriers to and opportunities for improvement of health, safety, and well-being. Identifying opportunities, working with partners, to address barriers, and developing an understanding of community needs. This project is partially Funded by a Sebastopol Community Grant.

Goals

• Discover opportunities to improve the health, safety, and well-being within the community.

• Share the results of the assessment with community partners to begin the process of collaboration to work toward a self-healing community

The long-term goal

• To continue to identify barriers to a self-healing community through data and explore available collaboration to work toward achievement.

Challenges

• Data for the Sebastopol Area has to be extrapolated from existing data collection methods to identify where we would need to include more local information through interviews and/or focus groups

Opportunities

• To use already existing data from many sources in Sonoma County

• To move this project forward through the Internship program we have established with the University of San Francisco,

Progress: Initial project completed, and report provided to the City of Sebastopol. This ongoing effort to gather data, assess, collaborate and improve is part of the self-healing community, we are trying to work toward.