Assessments and Strategies
Community Health Needs Assessments
The South Dakota Good & Healthy Community Health Needs Assessment and Improvement Planning Toolkit is an evidence-based resource to help your community:
Build local health coalitions
Understand the factors that determine its health status through a needs assessment and data collection process
Identify, prioritize, and address its health issues
Community Listening Sessions
Focus groups and larger community listening sessions allow local leaders and livability teams to engage directly with residents and stakeholders to learn what they want and to identify and solve problems. Such gatherings enable the team to collect information from a cross-section of the community to guide planning and develop a broader base of support. For more information, AARP has produced a “how-to” guide for conducting a community session.
Healthy Community Food & Beverage Toolkit
Communities can change their environment to make a healthy choice the easy choice for residents and visitors. This toolkit shows you how!
Healthy Workplace Food & Beverage Toolkit
Helping employees eat healthy at work supports their overall health and wellbeing, which can help decrease health costs. This toolkit shows you how you can make simple changes to vending, cafeterias, and meetings.
Housing Assessments
A housing needs assessment can help communities identify issues related to the housing market and is often for future planning, policy decisions, and financing issues. These assessments can be used by local entities (government, economic development, chamber of commerce, etc.) to attract and encourage residential development activity and investment. They can also be used by social services organizations to understand housing issues specific to certain populations (e.g. homeless, people with disabilities, older adults, etc.).
Walk Audits
Most communities in our state are designed almost exclusively for automobile travel, which may not consider the needs of pedestrians or bicyclists. You can help make your community more walkable by conducting a walk audit to identify the roads and intersections that are dangerous for pedestrians but can and should be safely walkable and crossable. A walkable community has many benefits for health, recreation, social interaction and even the economy! For more information, check out the following resources:
Workplace Health Resources
American adults spend the majority of each day at the workplace. Learn how to enhance health and wellbeing at work with these resources.