QUESTION
Council Member Stevens Asks DYCD About Community Needs Assessments and NDA Feedback
0:23:32
·
90 sec
Council Member Althea Stevens inquires about the accuracy of community needs assessments and the distribution method of survey results to Neighborhood Development Areas (NDAs). Deputy Commissioner Mike Bobitt affirms the process's effectiveness and outlines how assessments incorporate wide community input through street surveys, public hearings, and online surveys. He emphasizes the role of Neighborhood Advisory Boards (NABs) in hosting and facilitating these assessments, ensuring they reflect real community priorities and guide program design for addressing unmet needs.
Speaker 6
0:23:32
Do you
Speaker 1
0:23:32
think the community needs assessment accurately reflects community priorities?
0:23:36
And how are the results of the survey distributed back to the NDAs?
Speaker 3
0:23:41
I do, and they are.
0:23:42
I wanna say a little bit more about that.
0:23:45
And and, Sharon, I know you're familiar with how the NABs work.
0:23:48
So, again, consistent with this idea of the maximum feasible participation of those impacted by poverty, hearing directly through residents, through the street surveys that happened.
0:23:59
We expanded that most recently, we did the community assessment by making an online survey available as well by hosting public hearings.
0:24:07
And I say host, but it's really the NAB members that host, and then we help facilitate to make sure they run the the meetings.
0:24:14
And I will acknowledge several members of the council as well as state senate state assembly members have attended.
0:24:21
Some of those last public hearings, those are things we wanna keep keep going.
0:24:25
Current providers, past providers come out to those hearings too.
0:24:28
So I think that it's a forum for us to hear a wide range of perspectives, and what emerges from that are the highest priority needs.
0:24:35
The way that we have funded the NDA in relation to that is to look most carefully at the needs gap questions.
0:24:42
So when people say what are the highest priority needs of the neighborhood, we're also asking them what have you needed that you haven't gotten, and that's helped inform the design of the programs they do.
0:24:52
So I think that we have a consistent and a coherent approach where we're listening very carefully to New Yorkers, to residents are affected by poverty.