An Updated Community Needs Assessment for a Dynamic Community

Located in the metro Vancouver area, Richmond is a dynamic and diverse city featuring a blend of residential and commercial property, parks, agricultural lands and waterways. The city had experienced significant growth since the last community needs assessment nearly a decade ago, with over half of its residents now born outside of Canada. Consistent community needs assessments are vital to a city’s success, and Richmond was due for another that would accurately reflect the City’s current population toward the goal of better serving this evolving community. The assessment is helping to ensure that the City’s arts, culture & heritage department, parks, recreation & sports and library services are accessible to all residents and able to meet their needs.

Connecting with Richmond

The updated community needs assessment aims to help the City of Richmond achieve its goal of creating an inclusive, equitable and welcoming community for its residents.

Citywide goals that guided the assessment:

• Gather the perspectives of residents and stakeholders about community programs, services and facilities.
• Understand community perspectives in the context of current and projected population and demographic information and identify key needs across segments of the population.
• Examine results to better understand how to address unmet program and service needs.

To help the city of Richmond better serve its residents, our team used a mixed-method approach and specific measures informed by past assessment findings to ensure accurate data collection and the capability to measure change over time. 

Key features of the methodology:

• A goal to connect with “harder to reach” groups helped ensure a representation of a wide range of perspectives and encouraged outreach with organizations dedicated to supporting vulnerable communities.
• Implementation of a community-scale survey that effectively captured a demographically and geographically representative sample and focus groups with key segments of the community including seniors and recent immigrants. 
• Strategies to overcome participation barriers included providing taxi vouchers, interpreters, parking passes and free childcare services.

Shaping the City’s Future

The needs assessment found that, while a majority of Richmond residents engage with city services and programs on a regular basis, there were significant group differences in service engagement and needs, and these are informing future planning. The assessment provides the city with strategies that benefit the community’s current needs and equips City leaders with future considerations as Richmond continues to grow and evolve. In addition to ensuring that all community members have access to necessary programs and services, the City aspires to make Richmond a place where residents can feel supported and enriched through services that reflect their needs and help the community grow together. The City continues to work strategically to foster a sense of belonging, promote well-being, invest in the natural environment, capitalise on the area’s cultural diversity and work together to create a vibrant community.