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Assessing child and family well-being needs and assets at the community level demands a multi-pronged approach leveraging both quantitative and qualitative methods and multiple modalities of speaking with families, service providers, and other community members. Public data offer a wealth of information, yet they are at times limited in their granularity, recency, and relevance as answers to the core questions a group might want to ask.
The family-centered methods in this toolkit are designed to meet families where they are and with the intention to include people who are least likely to be heard in matters that affect them. Too often the lived experiences of families are not just unheard but disregarded as anecdotal. However, by systematically documenting the experiences of young people and their caregivers, we can transform anecdotes into evidence. This toolkit offers a structure for collecting and analyzing the views of community members and creates a record that can be referenced not just for developing local service arrays that are responsive to communities’ strengths and needs, but also as a record for future efforts to leverage and monitor progress over years.