With an understanding of community needs and assets, you are ready to begin your community assessment. Step 1 involves defining the scope of the assessment to be performed. Because community issues are complicated and one issue is often related to many other issues, it is easy to keep expanding the range of issues to include in your assessment. A community assessment can address several issues and their inter-relationships or it can focus on just one of the issues. To define the scope of your community assessment, you must clearly state the community needs to be assessed, the community members who will be impacted, the geographic area that will be addressed, the key questions you want answered, and the level of detail you want to include in the assessment.