Chapter 5- Needs Assessment and Data Analytics: Understanding Your Constituencies

Needs assessment is an important early step in the development of a mentoring program because it helps ensure that program resources go toward improving prioritized institutional results. Needs assessment should involve key stakeholders, organized into a needs assessment committee, and then follow a systematic process to collect and analyze quantitative and qualitative data and identify existing organizational needs. Needs are defined as the gap between desired organizational results and current results. They should be considered holistically and at all levels of the organization. As needs are identified, the needs assessment committee works with stakeholders through a combination of group management techniques to prioritize needs and identify solutions. The results are shared in a needs assessment report. Big data can provide additional insight to needs assessment by focusing on actual behavior and allowing for greater audience segmentation

Review of \u3ci\u3eNo Place Like Home: Notes from a Western Life\u3c/i\u3e by Linda M. Hasselstrom

What\u27s happening to Linda Hasselstrom\u27s Great Plains is happening everywhere, even in western Maine, where New Yorkers migrate north, buying second houses in communities once home to lobstermen, farmers, and lumberjacks, changing the face of the social, political, and natural landscape. It\u27s enough to make a person, well, want to let off some steam, and perhaps try to come to some conclusions about what is happening to land and community in America in general and in the Great Plains in particular, which is what Hasselstrom does in her newest work of nonfiction. In this collection of linked essays, she returns to the ranch in Hermosa, South Dakota, where she grew up, unsurprised that it has changed from a ranching community to a splintered landscape of subdivisions and ranchettes. One of the questions she chases in this work is whether those new community members, those second-home owners, those investors, ever will form real community. Will they join a church, contribute to the volunteer fire department, help on the fire line? The book is first about this, the creation of community in an era when community seems to be splitting itself like multiply shattered atoms, and second, amidst this wave of disconnection of people from land and each other, about how to find one\u27s home

Low-Income Fathers and Child Support: Starting off on the Right Track

Examines the treatment of low-income fathers in the child support system in the United States and how the system could be improved. Includes recommendations for child support programs, state legislative action, and federal action