Community Needs Assessment Results to be Revealed

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – The results of a community needs assessment will lay some groundwork for addressing workforce needs in the Mahoning Valley.

Those results will be announced Oct. 11 at the Youngstown/Warren Regional Chamber’s 2024 Public Policy Conference at The Grand Resort in Howland. The Regional Chamber and Youngstown Area Goodwill Industries conducted the community needs assessment, which included surveys and focus groups, this past summer.

Brenda Linert, director of government affairs and community impact at the Regional Chamber, said the data is still being compiled, but so far, it’s showing what officials expected to see.

“We all have ideas, and, anecdotally, we talk a lot about what we think some of the issues might be that are keeping local people out of the workforce,” she said. “And this study was really intended to help us to verify those beliefs, and it did. And so, as we have said before, now what we intend to do is to try to develop some action plans.”

Shelley Murray, CEO of Goodwill Industries, agreed.

“We really just needed something to tell us what we already knew,” she said. “We wanted to know, is there something going on in the community that we’re not seeing or is there a trend starting that maybe we can get ahead of.”

The barriers that rose to the top through the assessment, though, are what officials suspected. Transportation and child care are significant obstacles keeping people out of the workforce. 

Mental health was also brought up frequently in both the focus groups and the survey, Murray said. 

“But it’s the beginning of a process of really being able to say, OK, now we have a formal process,” Murray said. “We know what these barriers are and what can we do moving forward to move past those barriers and overcome them.” 

Ideas for how to do that will be part of what’s reviewed at the conference.

Anyone interested can register for the event on the chamber’s website.

Murray said there was much interest in the assessment as the agencies were gathering information, with a lot of businesses and organizations wanting to participate.

“People were really looking forward to this process and the outcomes of it,” she said.

It was a community-wide effort, and many people wanted to participate.

Panel discussions are part of the agenda at the Oct. 11 event. One will focus on workforce participation and development, with representatives of Lake to River Economic Development and OhioMeansJobs, state Rep. Nick Santucci and a representative of Lt. Gov. Jon Husted’s office.

“We’re going to talk about why we think that a lot of the businesses are struggling [to find workers], where these people are, how we can get them into the workforce,” Linert said.

Other panel discussions at the conference will address economic development and site selection process readiness and energy reliability and sustainability.

A next step regarding the needs assessment will involve roundtable discussions with stakeholders, including government officials and people involved in training, to talk about how to combat the challenges and barriers that keep people out of the workforce. 

Both Linert and Murray believe the conference is an important event for business people, government officials and representatives of other organizations to attend.

“Really, it’s going to be about allocation of resources in the right direction,” Murray said. “Our elected officials, we’ve had them visit here at Goodwill, and they’re interested in knowing what are the needs of the community. I think the younger elected officials that are in office are really committed to bringing the resources to our area and really overcoming some of these challenges. A lot of them are workforce development-minded, which is great to see.”

Linert said workforce participation and development affects chamber members and the community in general.

“Look at it this way – those big companies that are going to be coming in, they’re going to find their workers, right?” she said. “They’re going to have the means and the wherewithal to go out and find their people, and they might be plucking those people from the small businesses, and then the small businesses will struggle and may not survive.”

Pictured at top: Brenda Linert, director of government affairs and community impact at the Youngstown/Warren Regional Chamber.

Copyright 2024 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.