Ottawa County Community Assessment
Results Released
View Community
Assessment 
February 10, 2004 - Greater Ottawa
County United Way and Volunteer Center is pleased to
officially release the first countywide Community Assessment.
The Community Assessment identifies the challenges,
strengths and opportunities of health and human services
in Ottawa County and will be used as a baseline for
ongoing community health and human service planning.
The Assessment has been coordinated by Greater Ottawa
County United Way & Volunteer Center, in partnership
with a number of health and human service organizations
throughout Ottawa County and is available to the public.
“I’m pleased to be involved because I can
see the value of the process.” Says former State
Representative Jon Jellema, Chair of the Community Assessment
Leadership Team and Dean of Arts and Humanities at Grand
Valley State University. “This marks the first
effort in Ottawa County at gathering information about
critical issues on a countywide basis.”
The Assessment took a “snapshot” of the
community by gathering data from different sources (focus
groups, household surveys, key informant surveys, youth
surveys), comparing the results with other data and
documenting the findings in areas such as general household
issues, children, youth, seniors, person with disabilities
and diversity. The Assessment offers a description of
community assets, problems, household issues, household
problems, and barriers in services based on response
from youth, community leaders and from a representative
sample of total county households. “Information
from this year’s Community Assessment is a valuable
tool for planning,” said Jellema. “This
year’s report establishes a base-line against
which to chart our progress in dealing with various
issues in the years following.”
Some community assets that were gleaned from the household
survey of 2,000 respondents, show that community members
feel that Ottawa County is an excellent/good place to
live, that education is perceived to be strong overall,
that crime ranks relatively low as a perceived community
problem and that community members feel empowered to
affect change in the community.
The top ten household issues gathered through the household
survey of 2,000 respondents are: having a lot of anxiety,
stress, or depression; finding it difficult to budget;
not being able to find work; not being able to pay for
or get medical insurance; not having enough money to
pay the doctor or buy prescription medications; not
being able to afford recreational activities; not being
able to afford legal help; children or teenagers experiencing
behavior or emotional problems; often feeling lonely;
and not have enough money to pay for housing, respectively.
“Although it is a countywide assessment, great
care was taken to ensure that the household survey responses
were representative of the demographics in our community.”
Says Abby Reeg, Director of Community Investment and
Assessment Coordinator for Greater Ottawa County United
Way & Volunteer Center. “Care was also taken
to review data by quadrant, recognizing that some needs
may be vastly different in Holland versus Coopersville,
for example.”
The Assessment also broke the county into four county
quadrants; northwest, northeast, southwest, and southeast,
representing all municipalities that provides a geographic
description of strengths and problems in each of the
four quadrants.
“Again, information gleaned from these surveys
are merely a snapshot of what was going on in our community
at that time that gave us an overall view of some of
the areas that we may need to concentrate our efforts.”
Says Jellema. “The next step for this process
is to create a community plan that will establish outcomes
[goals] for the community’s health and human service
programs to work towards, indicators and an evaluation
to gauge whether the community is making progress towards
those outcomes.”
The Countywide Community Assessment was made possible
through funding from Greater Ottawa County United Way
& Volunteer Center, Building Restorative Communities,
Community action Agency, Coopersville Community Foundation,
Grand Haven Area Community Foundation, Grant #02-JN-FX-0068,
funded by the Office of National Drug Control Policy
and managed by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
and Senior sections, Holland/Zeeland Area Community
Foundation and Southeast Ottawa Community Foundation
and an anonymous corporate donor.
To view
the Community Assessment, click here. The information
is in PDF form and may take several minutes to download
depending on your connection speed. Printed copies of
the assessment will be available for pick up from both
our North and South offices at the end of March. If
you are interested in United Way & Volunteer Center
officials talking with your organization regarding assessment
details or for more information, contact Abby
Reeg.
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