The Assessment of the Housing Needs of American Indians, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians in Washington State project is a year-long study being funded by the Washington State Department of Commerce and coordinated by Big Water Consulting in partnership with Akana and Nancy Pindus of the Urban Institute. In 2019, King County-based Native organizations and service providers requested that Washington State fund this effort to provide critical, comprehensive housing needs data concerning Native communities in Washington State, which had not been included in the statewide 2015 Housing Needs Assessment for Washington State or its update in 2018. In addition to assessing Native housing needs, a core goal of this project is to identify barriers to the management, development and rehabilitation of Native housing in Washington State and to provide recommendations for reducing or eliminating those barriers.
This survey is designed to gather information, perspectives and opinions from staff of organizations that provide housing to members of the Native community in Washington State. In addition to this survey, a separate Advisory Group Member survey will be administered to individuals, organizations and agencies that provide services which support housing providers.
The data collected via the following survey will be part of a larger, comprehensive data set that will include existing state, tribal and federal data; qualitative data from interviews and focus groups; and information extracted from other studies, plans and articles reviewed as part of the literature review process for this assessment. As you respond to certain survey questions, you may note that these questions ask for your perception, opinion or best estimates rather than seeking official data or statistics. We ask these questions this way because your perceptions are an important addition to the administrative and statistical data we are collecting. With this approach, we are trying to limit the data compilation burden on survey respondents. In some cases, your responses may be used to complement or compare with data from other sources. Please answer these questions to the best of your ability and consult with other staff members of your program or other programs if necessary.
Please respond to questions with pre-Covid-19 levels, needs, and capacities. There will be a separate survey addressing pandemic response and impacts. It is important that the data collected from this survey represents the ongoing state of Native housing needs rather than representing the unique issues and levels of need created by the current pandemic.
Not all questions will be relevant to all survey respondents, and, if you find that a particular question is not relevant to you or your organization or it would not be appropriate for you to answer the question (e.g., HUD ONAP staff members evaluating programs that they administer), please mark “N/A” to signify that the question is “Not Applicable.”
This survey is part of a state-funded project and the results of this survey will be aggregated and made public, but project coordinators will carefully review all information submitted and reporting materials produced to ensure that any personally identifiable information is removed and legally-mandated data confidentiality is preserved.
We estimate that this survey will take approximately 90 minutes to complete, but this may vary depending on the size of your entity and number of projects your entity is involved in.
We value your insights and appreciate your participation. If you have any other questions or concerns, please contact Kevin Klingbeil at kevin@bigwaterconsulting.net and/or Rachel Kramer at rachel@bigwaterconsulting.net.
