Defining Community

This worksheet was created by The Denver Foundation's Inclusiveness Project (http://www.nonprofitinclusiveness.org/) to support organizations doing inclusiveness work.

Users are encouraged to customize the worksheet (both content and formatting) to meet the needs of their respective organizations. A Word version is attached. A writable PDF version is also attached.

The information-gathering process begins with collecting data about your community. Your community is the geographic area that your organization serves, sometimes called your "catchment area."

Instructions

Make sure you have internal agreement about the definition of your community.  

• For example, if your organization is located in a suburban community, you will want to clarify whether your community is the whole surrounding metropolitan statistical area or whether it is limited to your suburban community.
• If your organization is rural, you may want to define community as the whole county or even a whole section of the state.
• Keep in mind that the U.S. Census generally tracks information by block, urban area, ZIP code, metropolitan statistical area (MSA), county, and state.

Define the "community" on which you will gather data and record that definition here:

Definition of Community

Name of Organization __________________________________________

Date Exercise Completed _________