What is the Community Assessment Tool?

The SAVI community assessment & planning tool follows a basic framework for community assessment. It can be used in conjunction with your assessment process to help you make more informed decisions about priorities for program improvement and to plan projects that leverage existing community resources.

How does this differ from SAVI’s other tools? It draws in the same detailed data you are accustomed to in SAVI, but it saves you the hassle of mining thousands of data options and saves you from having to summarize your data and create custom charts and maps. This tool does it all for you, saving hours of data compilation so that you can focus on your decision making process.

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Find out what your community needs.

This tool provides easy access to important data that will help you identify the areas of greatest community need and advance the best solutions to address these needs. It is designed to help you focus your resources more effectively in your community and make a bigger impact.

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Explore key areas for community impact.

The SAVI community assessment & planning tool focuses on UWCI’s four key areas for community impact:

  1. Education
  2. Financial Stability
  3. Health
  4. Basic Needs

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Monitor community needs and assets in Central Indiana.

Developed by the Polis Center for the United Way of Central Indiana, this tool is updated continuously for an 11-county region of Central Indiana, including Boone, Brown, Hamilton, Hancock, Hendricks, Johnson, Madison, Marion, Morgan, Putnam, and Shelby counties.

Advisory Committee

Thank you to the following individuals who served on the SAVI Community Assessment & Planning Advisory Committee that guided the development of this website:

  • Bob Cross, Consultant (Retired Director of Research, United Way of Central Indiana)
  • Karen Gentleman, Owner and Consultant, Gentleman McCarty
  • Demetrius Glover, Ph.D., Vice President of Strategic Information, United Way of Central Indiana
  • Carmen Luca Sugawara, Ph.D., Associate Professor, IU School of Social Work at IUPUI
  • Denise Luster, Director of Research and Evaluation, United Way of Central Indiana
  • Lexie McGillis, Research Analyst, United Way of Central Indiana
  • Diane Pfeiffer, Consultant
  • Kayli Schafer Krevda, Director of Strategic Research, United Way of Central Indiana

FUNDING

We thank the Glick Fund and Lilly Endowment, Inc. for their financial support to make the SAVI Community Assessment & Planning tool possible.

     

Data Available in this SAVI Community Assessment Tool

The following is a list of indicators included in the SAVI community assessment tool. You can view detailed documentation about each indicator and its limitations within the dashboard.

SAVI calculates these indicators for your custom area, which means, after you select your assessment geography, the system goes to work calculating totals, percentages, and rates specific to your custom geography. When available, we calculate these same indicators for the total population and for each race group, age groups, education level, and poverty status to allow you to look for disparities and differences. Some indicators are not available for certain geography levels and will be left blank on the dashboard when this applies to your assessment area.