Capacity and Need: A Spatial Analysis of Australian Communities

This paper presents the results of work undertaken to develop small area indexes of community capacity and need, and apply these indexes to identify those regions in Australia with a combination of reasonably high need and good levels of community capacity. These regions form possible suggested areas for the targeting of The Smith Family's Learning for Life program. This paper provides an introduction to the work undertaken for The Smith Family; and presents a brief description of the empirical and theoretical background to the concept of 'community capacity', and of the methodology applied in developing the indexes of community capacity and need. The particular focus of this paper is on the spatial analysis used to identify high capacity and high need areas at both a state and national level. This spatial analysis mostly entails a description of the spatial distribution of the two indexes, and how they overlap.