Determine if your community is ready for action. Ask yourself these questions. The more you can answer “yes” to, the more likely your campaign is to succeed.
- Is there interest in this issue from multiple people?
- Do tribal leaders support this?
- Are there existing programs that want to further their work?
- Are you likely to find resources to support your efforts?
- Do you have knowledge about child passenger safety, or can you partner with other local or regional experts?
- Do you have access to local data or the ability to collect data?
For a quick snapshot of your community’s readiness, take our online assessment. It will give you a quick overview of your tribe’s readiness stage.
Using the Community Assessment Tool with a Team. If you prefer to assess readiness with a coalition or other team, you can use a special pdf version of our Assessment Tool, found here .This tool is intended to stimulate conversation among members of your community. Print this tool and complete it with your coalition or other key members of your tribal community. As you discuss each section of the tool, you may find varying results from different people. This is normal, and it is useful to have different perspectives. Different viewpoints may indicate your community is in an earlier stage of readiness.
Scoring the Tool. There are different ways to score the tool. For a numeric score, add up the scores of all the dimensions. Then, match your “score” with the appropriate stage on our continuum of readiness. For a more visual scoring approach, consider the predominant “color” in your answers and match that color to the readiness continuum.
For a more involved assessment, refer to the Tri-Ethnic Center’s Assessment Tool. If you are interested in gathering more qualitative data about your tribe’s beliefs and feelings about child passenger safety, go to Module 5.
For an even less-involved approach, go to the next section, 2.5, and select the description that best fits your community.
A Tip from the Team
Not all the tribes that have implemented Native CARS have had high levels of community readiness. Some started at Denial/Resistance, and others at Stabilization. Regardless of their starting point, every tribe has seen improvements in child passenger safety. Part of this success is due to recognizing their community’s readiness level and developing activities geared to that level.