Map Your Community

Before you start a service project, you need to understand what your community needs. To figure this out, you can map your community. This means you find out what your community's strengths and weaknesses are and decide how you can help. Then, you can develop a project that will meet this need.

To do this:

1. Decide what your community is. It can be your school campus, neighborhood, church, youth center, five block radius or entire city. You get the idea!

2. Take a tablet and pen and walk through the area you define as your community. If you have a lot of ground to cover, have someone drive you around the area. Recruit friends to help you do this. It's more fun that way!

Make notes of:

• Identify key places, organizations, and institutions in the community
• Where do people congregate?
• What are the most important businesses in the area?
• What recreation facilities, schools, associations, churches, and other neighborhood groups exist?
• Are there different cultures or ethnicities?
• What are the age demographics for the area (older people or younger)?
• What assets does your community have? What good things do you see?
• What needs does your community have? What problems do you see? (For example: litter, kids playing in dangerous areas, speeding cars, stray animals, children without books, homeless people, are there tensions in neighborhoods, do elderly need help)

After observing your community:

• Read through your notes and consider what you have learned. Consider what the issues are and how you can make a difference. How can you develop a project that can improve the situation or help?
• If you observed your community with others, sit down and discuss everyone's notes and brainstorm what you can do.
• Add issues to your list that you are aware exist but may not have seen in your observance of the community.

Contact community organizations or your local government officials:

Ask them what issues exist in your community and how you can help.

Create a community map:

• List the community assets
• List the community problems/needs
• Mark assets and needs in different colors

Identify the problem you want to focus on:

• Select the problem you want to help correct
• Do research with local officials, organizations, and the newspaper to get more background information of the problem.
• Visit www.communityyouthmapping.org to view resources you may want to use.

Define Your Service Project and Assign Responsibilities:

What will you do? What is the goal of your project? Who will you help? What do you want to accomplish?

• Be specific. Write details of what you'll do and how you will accomplish it. How many volunteers will you need helping you with the project? How many people will you help? What supplies will you need?
• What do you want to learn from this project?
• How do you think this activity will help others?
• Does the targeted group really need the proposed project and will they be receptive to it?

Establish a timeline for your project and assign tasks to yourself and others who are helping you.

• Make a list of everything that needs to be done and assign each task
• Select date(s) for project

Tasks will likely include:

• contact the group your project involves and make sure they are willing to participate and/or to accept the help you are offering or what you are doing
• engage community partners (Contact local organizations to ask if they are interested in partnering with you on this project.)
• secure funds or in-kind donations (Contact local businesses and ask if they will sponsor your project or will donate supplies.)
• get needed supplies 
• recruit volunteers to help
• coordinate short kick-off event
• send invitations to government officials asking their support of the project and ask them to participate in the kick-off event
• write and send press release to media
• post-event celebration for planning group
• write and send thank you notes to everyone who was involved in or supported your project