Documenting Vermont Needs, Assets, and Angles in Support of Thriving Communities

Even small states like Vermont have a vast array of community-level needs, efforts and approaches to addressing them, which makes effective coordination and prioritization challenging for organizations, governments, and other entities concerned with social and environmental change.

Partners are building a state-wide community needs assessment aligned with the work embodied in the Land Grant Mission which guides UVM, and the promise of UVM Extension to the state. This project is the first, 12-month phase of a two-year initiative with the goals of (1) categorizing Vermont community needs, (2) documenting the entities that work toward these needs (including their assets and approaches, or “angles”), and (3) piloting a methodology for contrasting articulations of community needs and assets to understand how differently situated documents and community members write and talk about community needs. With this foundation, year two will focus on putting into practice relevant actions based on the documentation of community needs, assets, and angles in year one.