Identify
Description
The Identify phase includes two key activities: the Landscape Assessment and the Community Assessment. The Landscape Assessment uses existing data sources to build an initial understanding of children's environmental health conditions. The Community Assessment involves meeting in-person with child-serving organizations to identify actual needs, concerns, and gaps in services.
Guidance
The Identify phase is the first step in understanding how a disaster has affected children's environmental health. It helps teams gather important information before launching or expanding recovery efforts. During this phase, it's important to collect accurate information, understand the local community's needs, and consider factors like geography, culture, and income that can affect children's health after a disaster. Teams should also think about who might not be represented in the data, especially communities that are often overlooked or harder to reach.
This phase matters because it lays the groundwork for a strong, fair recovery. The Landscape Assessment gives a broad overview using existing data sources. The Community Assessment adds current insights by talking directly with local organizations that support children. Together, these activities help identify what children and families need most, so resources can be focused where they're needed the most. This helps ensure recovery plans are based on both facts and lived experiences.
Landscape Assessment
The Landscape Assessment is meant to be completed either before deployment or as soon as the team is assigned to the mission, so responders can quickly understand the conditions and risks facing children in the affected area.
Instructions
The Landscape Assessment gives recovery teams a solid understanding of the affected community's demographics, children's programs, and environmental health context. This pre-deployment report has two main goals: (1) to help recovery personnel prepare for effective, focused engagement with local stakeholders, and (2) to assist the recovery leadership team in identifying priority children's programs and prioritizing interviews about the most relevant environmental health concerns.
The Landscape Assessment includes three sections:
Community Demographics: Provides an overview of the community's population and key characteristics.
Children's Programs: Lists programs that provide care and services to children in the community.
Post-Disaster Environmental Health Scan: Reviews common health and safety issues affecting children, based on open media and open-source data.
For more detailed instructions, refer to Appendix A: Landscape Assessment Instructions.
For an illustrative example, see Appendix B: Landscape Assessment Example.
Community Assessment
The Community Assessment builds on the information collected during the Landscape Assessment. It involves meeting with local partners who provide services to children and having structured conversations to better understand their real concerns. These discussions help recovery teams plan actions and services that can reduce long-term harm to children after a disaster.
Instructions
The Disaster Reference Guide (Appendix C) provides educational information on how the disaster may lead to environmental hazards that affect children. Reviewing this guide helps teams identify which hazards are most relevant to the affected area.
Use the Landscape Assessment to identify which children's programs may be most important to engage. The Children's Programs At-a-Glance (Appendix D) offers definitions, potential partners, suggested methods of engagement, and planning considerations. Decisions about which programs to engage and how to proceed should be made in coordination with the recovery lead.
The Landscape Assessment and Disaster Reference Guide provide information to help determine which environmental hazards are most likely to impact children in the area. The corresponding Environmental Hazards Summary Sheets (Appendix E) include educational resources, keywords, discussion prompts, and sample interventions that may help support planning.
Engage community-based children's program partners in structured discussions about environmental health concerns. Collect notes from these conversations to identify themes, validate findings, and inform the development of the Issue Report (Appendix F), which is described in the Analyze section.
Documentation
When gathering notes during conversations with children's program partners, it's important to capture key details that will help inform the recovery process. These notes should provide a clear picture of the challenges faced by each program, the actions they have taken, and the support they may need. Collecting specific information helps ensure that all concerns are understood and accurately represented as the recovery team moves forward. Below are suggested details to include in the notes to help make them as useful and actionable as possible.
Date of Conversation: When the discussion took place
Children's Program Name and Type: Who was engaged (e.g., Head Start, school, afterschool program)
Participants: Names and roles of people involved in the conversation
Identified Issues or Concerns: Specific environmental health or safety challenges raised
Context and Supporting Details: How the issue affects children, when it started, and what's making it worse
Actions Taken: What the program has already tried to do in response
Barriers or Gaps: What's preventing them from fully addressing the issue
Desired Support: What help or resources they say would make a difference
Quotes or Stories: Direct quotes or short anecdotes that highlight how the issue impacts children or families
Additional Observations: Any other insights, patterns, or emotional tone worth noting