blueprints

Tools for Practical Dreaming | 203
elderly members of the community. Whether you re-create the same
kind of program that originally connected you with poetry or
decide to do something new, the most important thing is that you
work out of a sense of what matters most to you.
E. Ask: can we begin any of these programs under current conditions,
with available or easily obtained resources? If not, how can we break
them down into smaller parts that can be tackled one at a time?
ASSESS NEEDS
You’ve begun the work of assessing needs. You may not have performed
a formal needs assessment, but in the section above, you and your group
members responded to your needs, your sense that something is lacking
in your lives or in the life of your community, and you would like to address
this lack.
It’s a good idea to get as precise a sense as possible of what the need
actually is. If several readings a week are held in your town, yet you still feel
the need for another, identify for yourself and your group just what is missing.
Readings by local poets? Emerging poets? Poets writing in Spanish,
Yiddish, or some other language? A kind of event that is either more or less
structured than what you have? You need to know. Thus, it’s a good idea to
do a needs assessment that is as thorough as you can manage.
Consider your Community
If you live in (or want to create a program for) a very small community—a
small town, a school, a neighborhood, even a geographically spread
out but otherwise well-defined ethnic group—this may appear to be a
fairly simple matter. Assessing your community includes looking at demographics,
habits, and activities. But even in the case of a small community, it
doesn’t hurt to look around, maybe even to make a few calls, to both prevent
duplication and avoid unnecessary competition among different programs.
Even if your high school program focuses on literary poets, there’s
no point in discovering too late that you’ve scheduled an event on the same
night as the weekly high school slam.
In a very small community, you probably don’t want to schedule your
events against any other community event or gathering. In this case, your
assessment will survey not only literary events but also all events taking
place within a given period and geographical area. Even if the events are