Health, education, social services, recreation, fire and ambulance services, and law enforcement all work together to help support the quality of life in your community. This alone makes them an important and indispensable feature in your neighborhood. Not only that, in any community, these services can be of great help.
You can expect many types of service facilities in any community. They may vary for each neighborhood. Aside from the ones mentioned earlier, however, the most common can include community centers (either for the whole community, for seniors, or for the youth), post offices, museums, auditoriums, fitness centers, libraries, family service centers, parks, dining facilities, daycare facilities, and community-level financial institutions.
Features of a Good Facility
It’s important to have these facilities in your community, especially now that the world is in a crisis. However, they must be designed to meet the needs of everybody. This can be achieved if the whole community is involved during the planning phase.
In general, however, a good facility should be accessible to all. Each facility should accommodate the population of your community. They should be multipurpose and flexible. For example, a youth center should have high-quality demountable glass office partitions to accommodate different activities scheduled to occur at the same time. The more a facility can serve, the happier the people are.
Does your community lack one or more of the facilities mentioned above? If it does, today’s article is for you. Learn more about how services provided by community facilities become important for the people they serve. After that, know what steps you can take to build a community facility in your area.
Importance of Community Facilities
Almost everyone in a community can benefit from service facilities. It could be spending time in a library, receiving urgent care, going to school, reporting a crime, celebrating a charity event, or having fun in a park. In other words, your quality of life can be enhanced by community facilities. In fact, according to the National Recreation and Park Association, community facilities are a community’s essential partners
in helping combat physical inactivity, obesity, hunger, and poor nutrition.
While these benefits provide temporary help, there are members of your community that depend on community facilities. Sometimes, it could be their lifeline. This can be true for the less fortunate who can’t afford even the most basic services.
As a whole, on one hand, community facilities strengthen communities. They foster inclusiveness, promote culture, encourage social responsibility, and prioritize the safety and health of the people they serve.
If you want to build or improve a community facility in your area, you need to determine what others need and want. It should cover the psychological, political, economic, cultural, intellectual, health, safety, and social needs of your community.
How to Build a Community Facility
To build a community facility, here are three suggestions from the Community Toolbox, a community service provided by the University of Kansas’ Center for Community Health and Development.
Know What Your Community Needs
First, you need to identify what facilities are already existing in your community. You must analyze whether they should be improved or removed to build a better one.
Are they effective in providing their respective services? Can they be accessed by everyone in the community? Can they accommodate the needs of everyone? Are they safe to use or do they provide safety with their services? These questions can help you determine the current status of existing facilities.
Then, you can ask everyone through a meeting or key representatives about what facilities are they expecting from the community. This should help you get an idea of what facility to build.
Put Together a Team
Next, assemble teams for each stage of planning, designing, restoring, or upgrading, and building the facilities that your community needs. You can ask for volunteers and if the community has funding, you can also hire professional help.
Gather Resources
Now you work to obtain the resources you’ll need for this project. Whether you’ll restore, upgrade, improve, or build a new one, you’ll need funding and materials. You can tap local government agencies for funding. You can also organize a charity event to gather funding and materials.
Private businesses in your area can also be asked for donations. Even individuals willing to help can donate. You can also collaborate and partner with organizations and groups that advocate building better communities such as the Community Toolbox.
You can also get the whole community involved. This means asking the local school, interest groups, community agencies, churches, and neighborhood groups to help not only in providing labor and materials but also for letting the word out about what your community needs. This can help reach the right people who have the financial means to provide funding for your project.
Build a Happy Community
With the needs identified, teams assembled, and resources available, you can now build a facility that your whole community can use and enjoy.
As you will see from everything that you organized, even the smallest acts and help of your fellow community members can have a huge impact in making everybody happy. Even your desire to have a community facility has resulted in that. You simply followed the suggestions above and now, everybody can be satisfied.
