By BOB MARTIN
Eagle Times Staff
CLAREMONT, N.H. — The TLC Family Resource Center is currently administering phase two of a survey aimed at understanding the needs and experiences of families in Claremont through the Strengthening Families Program.
According to Strengthening Families Initiative Coordinator Matthieu Fortier, the survey is being funded through the New Hampshire Children’s Trust in an effort to gather information from the community on how to better help local families with their needs.
“I think the most notable quality of this program as it is designed right now is that it is an open, flexible program with a scope that is as wide as the community needs it to be,” he said. “When I took over this role of being the coordinator three months ago, I was tasked in identifying pain points in the community for families raising children in Claremont.”
The Strengthening Families Initiative is focused on enhancing the well-being of families in the city of Claremont through fostering change and providing support. The survey is meant to be voluntary with responses being confidential. The first 100 respondents will receive a $20 Amazon gift card.
There are multiple choice questions that include basic information about how long people have lived in Claremont, age, number of children, workweek information, income and type of work among others. These questions help Fortier get an idea of who is responding and where specific needs will lie.
Fortier wants to see what parts of the community are expressing one need over another.
Other questions pertain to the children involved, asking about their friend groups and routines at home. There is also a group of questions where respondents need to say on a scale of one to six whether they “really disagree” or “really agree” about various questions.” An example is “I feel like I live in a safe, comfortable space,” and then the respondent will choose one to six with the top being “really agree.”
There are three questions at the end that are open ended, asking about struggles in trying to raise a family and how Claremont can be a better place to raise a family. These give families the opportunity to be heard saying what the community can do for them based on their needs.
“I am hoping people will fill these out extensively and not just one-word answers,” Fortier said. “Those are really going to be what defines and guides the programming being developed. That is going to be where this program kicks off a bit.”
He said the idea is to develop a service to serve these needs based on the feedback being gathered. Ultimately what he will build doesn’t need to be something new. It can be through an existing program that the community wants to see more available.
“This is a community needs assessment,” he said. “I used to be a case management in Vermont for developmental services, and we did needs assessments all the time. It’s a great tool to identify struggles, but also strengths. We use those to figure out which services can serve those needs most effectively. This is a larger scale one to reach out to community members.”
Phase one of the surveys involved a stakeholder and community leaders interview, where he reached out to teachers and local nonprofit administrators and local faith-based leaders. He said they took the “interesting information” learned from phase one, and he used this information to build the questions in this survey.
“We are trying to get out to families through the school district and community partners,” Fortier said. “The survey going out now is specifically for families, parents and kinship guardians like grandparents raising their grandkids. We want this to go out to as many people as we can reach to specifically ask them about what they need and what we need to fix.”
He explained that he worked with Claremont Superintendent Chris Pratt about getting the information out to stakeholders and teachers for the first phase. The district is also using their resources to reach families for phase two, with hopes that he receives 100 to 200 responses for data.
“Once I have that, I’ll take some time to look into what is needed,” Fortier said. “I am going to look at things like, are parents with three kids really needing childcare, or are parents with one kid needing food assistance. Things like that. I’ll take that analysis and present it in front of the school board.”
This will be a great opportunity in helping community members be heard. He pointed out that data is imperfect because the people providing it are imperfect, so they might say things in their responses for any number of reasons. There could be unconscious bias or they could have misunderstood instructions.
“So presenting data in a public forum like that will allow families to also correct or advocate so we have a clearer picture,” Fortier said.
Fortier expects that he will be meeting with the Claremont School Board in late September and then once that information is gathered and presented, he can move on to take the necessary steps to developing programming.
“In addition to presenting it, I will also have a review for the data publicly available with contact information directly to me,” he said. “The hope is that having this kind of open door, open email and phone number, can empower families to reach out to me. Part of the philosophy is to push families to take on leadership roles within the programs, and part of that is just being able to connect with me.”
The survey is rolling out in waves, and he has community members and the school district advertising it to get as many responses as possible. The link that families will have will be open indefinitely.
“Families should be welcome to respond whenever they get the chance,” he said. “I won’t shut it down after 30 days or something like that. It will be open. The hope is that in the future we will do these needs assessments more than once, and each time allow them to be open to get that feedback. If a program serves a need, and then three years from now the community has other ideas, this can set things up for the future.”
A QR code for the survey is attached and Claremont families are asked to take the time to fill it out for optimal data gathering. For more information, contact Fortier at [email protected]. The survey can be found here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd_9zufhQyHY7_QmzhCmYTdEP4MTskwloGOwZm68y9VdCk1Mg/formResponse
