Local needs assessment is the ongoing grassroots practice of identifying needs through direct contact with affected people and neighborhoods rather than relying only on distant administrative categories [@watters2014; @occupysandyorientation2012].
Within emergent disaster response, the term matters because conditions change quickly and official visibility is uneven. Needs become legible through door-to-door contact, conversation, debriefs, and repeated returns to the same places rather than through a single centralized survey [@twiggmosel2017; @watters2014].
Related terms
- Volunteer Intake, Orientation, and Role Matching in Emergent Disaster Response - the companion practice of matching people to the needs that assessment reveals
- Distributed Sensemaking - the wider process through which assessments become shared situational knowledge
- Mutual Aid Hub - the organizational form that often receives and routes assessment information