Looking at community well-being through the lens of a social needs assessment in Woodlands County

Woodlands County Council recently learned about the municipality’s social needs through an
assessment provided by HelpSeekers. Jesse Donaldson, EVP of Strategic Services, explained how the
process worked, what a social needs assessment is and why it matters. “We know in a post-Covid world,
the municipal and county governments (are) more important than ever to define, advocate and plan for
local needs because no other level of government will do it effectively.”
Using a mix of publicly available data and through focus groups and one-on-one interviews with
residents, HelpSeekers put together a map of the social needs in Woodlands County to help with future
preparations for the needs of residents, from infrastructure to programming to policy changes.
The first topic Donaldson touched on was social infrastructure. “All communities, regardless of size, have
and need a social infrastructure. In a smaller community, though, social infrastructure is just as much
the informal support networks that hold together a community, like neighbours coming together to help
each other if there’s a fire in the community and everyone rallies around, as is the recreation programs
that support youth well-being.”
Donaldson explained that they continually see a need for more complex supports like shelters, mental
health counselling, food banks, and support for substance abuse. “The tricky part of it is perpetually
balancing what you have today against community needs shifting more rapidly than I think we even
understand.”
She explained that they look for signals that show a misalignment between what the community needs
and what is available. “When the signals become obvious, such as receiving concerns from your
constituents or seeing even one or two people experiencing homelessness, it generally means you are
too late to the table.”
Donaldson added that continually monitoring a community’s needs can help make using limited
resources more impactful because they can use it where it’s best. “When I began this job three years
ago, it was common verbiage that communities experienced a tipping point around a population of a
hundred thousand. That’s when homelessness, mental health, substance use, and intimate partner
violence accelerated. Today, that’s laughable because we now know that all communities are struggling
in some sense with complex issues, both seen and unseen.”
She said rates of hidden homelessness in rural areas have skyrocketed and continue to. “We know that
affordability issues are particularly rural issues and growing inequity, income inequity, is prevalent in
every province and every community. Negative outcomes on youth and childhood well-being post-covid
are completely agnostic of town size, location, or available supports.”
Knowing this, Donaldson said the prospect was for Woodlands County to create a strategic road map to
address the municipality’s present and future needs. “What kind of social infrastructure do we need
today and in five or ten years? What kind of services,” she queried.
“From 2016 to 2021, there was a population decline in Woodlands County of 3.9 percent. Within that
decrease was a 22.2 percent drop in young adults between twenty and twenty-four years of age.
However, there was a 32 percent increase in Woodlands County residents aged 65 plus.

That alone, those two stats, although very known to people in these rooms, this is going to dictate a very
specific social infrastructure need,” said Donaldson. “We found a third of individuals are characterized as
low income, keeping in mind that the threshold for low income is extraordinarily low, so even people
who technically aren’t in that low-income category may likely experience issues with affordability,
increased stressed, and family conflict, due to economic strain.”
She explained that their data showed an eleven percent poverty rate among children aged 6-17. “While
that is not a huge amount, the impact that children living in poverty can have from a multi-generational
standpoint in your community can be significant.”
Donaldson explained that housing is one of the most important ways they assess a municipality. “You
have about 18 percent spending more than thirty percent on shelter costs and almost 2.5 percent
spending more than fifty percent. Given the fundamental role of housing, these indicators are really
helpful to signal unseen community stress.” She said the correlation between housing needs and higher
community rates of homelessness, family conflict, mental health challenges and substance abuse has
been shown through multiple studies.
She said the impact on the County of a burgeoning mental health crisis may be significant given the
small population and the informal connections’ importance to residents. She added that mental health
strain came through in their interviews with residents in a “pervasive way.” She also said that a mental
health strategy required political savvy and creativity.
“Based on what we did see, that was one of the more obvious signals that there may be a growing
misalignment between community needs and what exists today. We can’t do everything for everyone,
but we can look at priority populations based on where we are and the continuum of supports available
for them.”
For seniors, she said that could mean focusing on transportation needs, assisting with digital access for
services, phone programs to keep them connected, Meals on Wheels, income supports, and age-
appropriate infrastructure. She said positive after-school activities, school-based mental health
programming, and crime prevention were all good ideas for youth.
The balance came from deciding what to prioritize and when. She explained that about 70 percent of
the population has low needs and high well-being, 25 percent has moderate needs and moderate well-
being, and five percent has low well-being and high needs. The five percent are people or families facing
complex issues like mental health, substance use, and affordability.
Donaldson said which group the County focuses on and when should change frequently and that the
most important thing was being intentional. Her ideas included enhancing telecommunications for
remote service delivery and connectivity, mobile service units, flexible service delivery methods,
community hubs, sustainable transportation between hamlets, and leveraging private-public
partnerships to deliver services.