Capacity Inventory

Capacity Inventories focus on the strengths and character of a community’s constituents, often overlooked or underutilized in planning processes that focus on needs (or weaknesses). The inventory or mapping process to identify the community’s talents, assets, and resources involves four stages,

1. Skills Information involves listing individual citizen skills both learned and acquired, including those that are unrelated to profession or public life. At the end, citizens are usually asked to identify their Priority Skills, which are their strongest skills.
2. Community Skills are defined as the types of community work an individual has done in the past or would be willing to do in the future.
3. Enterprising Interests and Experience considers whether or not a person has considered starting a business or is currently involved in any type of business endeavor. This interview section explores barriers that the person might feel exist with regard to starting a business and examines factors that might encourage development.
4. Personal information is collected last for follow-up contacts.

The information is usually gathered through surveys or semi-structured interviews, and the results vary based upon the survey population and the way the interviews are constructed.

Additional steps in a capacity inventory can involve mining community information sources for additional information: phone books, town reports, organization membership lists, business directories, etc.