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Southborough moves survey phase of community needs assessment toward townwide outreach
Summary
Southborough Youth and Family Services is transitioning the community needs assessment into a public survey phase, planning townwide mailers, multilingual materials and in-person outreach to raise participation.
Southborough Youth and Family Services (SYFS) said May 15 it is moving from qualitative focus groups to a townwide survey designed to gather broader input for the community needs assessment.
SYFS Director Sarah Micas said the department “may have enough money in our budget actually to do a town wide mailer of a flyer” and described multiple outreach channels planned to boost participation. The flyer being used for outreach will include a QR code and a text link, and hard-copy surveys will be available on request by phone, she said.
The survey is available online in the five most common languages spoken in Southborough and will be promoted at events including International Night and Celebrate Wellness. Micas said the landing page will first prompt respondents to choose a preferred language.
Micas said the survey should take “less than 10 minutes” to complete. SYFS staff asked commission members to personally fill out the survey and to recruit neighbors and family members; they also offered to provide printed flyers for distribution.
On logistics, Micas said staff would prefer to send the flyer by mail to every household to ensure broad coverage and that the department will monitor response volume rather than fix a short deadline: the community needs assessment must be finished before the end of the calendar year, but the data-collection window is “flexible” in practice.
The commission discussed regular outreach roles for members and agreed to promote the survey through social posts and at upcoming events. SYFS Program Coordinator Emily Bordeaux was mentioned as assisting online promotion and office outreach.
The survey phase is the next step in an assessment that included prior focus groups and interviews; staff said the larger survey will provide the quantitative data necessary to finalize recommendations.
