Community Groups seeking resident feedback with COVID Community Check-In survey
Lanark Country residents: how have you been doing since the pandemic arrived?
That’s the main question behind a survey that’s been launched on behalf of nearly two dozen community service agencies from across Lanark County in an effort to gain insight and identify gaps when it comes to community services and programming.
The Table Community Food Centre, North Lanark Community Health Centre, and the Lanark County Situation Table are conducting the survey on behalf of an informal group of community service agencies that are working to ensure the community is well supported going forward with the pandemic.
“We’d like to know how you are doing, how to improve ongoing services, identify anything that might be missing, and hear about helpful community initiatives that may have flown under our radar,” explains Ramsey Hart, Executive Director with the Table Community Food Centre.
The survey touches on topics such as employment, mental health, financial well-being and food accessibility.
Hart adds that the groups hope to collect 400 survey responses in order to gain a solid understanding of the community needs and build out possible future programs and services to address what’s in those responses.
“Once we collect the survey data, we’ll look to identify gaps and needs within the community,” he explains, adding that they want all residents to respond to the survey.
“This survey isn’t only for community members who have used community service agencies in the past,” says Hart. “It’s open to the public and we want responses from across the community landscape.”
Hart adds that they’re also seeking to hear about good news stories coming from the past five months. “We want to feature how our community members have demonstrated resiliency and ensure we hear those stories as well.”
Lanark County Warden Brian Campbell says public engagement is necessary to gain a solid understanding to the community’s needs.
“Whenever we ask our residents to help out, they always step up,” says Campbell. “This request for more insight is no exception. We need our community members to take the 15 minutes to complete the survey so we can best support each person moving forward.”
As a further incentive to complete the survey, residents who wish to include their name and contact details when completing the survey will automatically be entered into a draw for one of four $100 grocery cards.
This survey is confidential and no personal information will be included with the report. All survey data and contacts will be deleted once the organizing groups complete the survey report. They will not use the survey information to add responders to a distribution list.To complete the survey, visit https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/X226GYM or visit thetablecfc.org and the survey link is on the homepage.
