Wants Versus Needs

Over the years that I have served in Cooperative Extension, I have watched program areas move through evolutionary phases. Not the forming, storming, norming, and performing kind. The kind that is about relevance.

Community Development is a case study. From 1914 into the 1950s it was present but not accounted for…community improvement was written into Extension's founding charge, and the ideas were quietly taking shape in rural sociology and agricultural economics, but there was no funding, no title, and no staff to carry them. Through the 1960s, it slowly came into its own, but remained tethered to agriculture and rural places. Only around 1970, with the founding of the Community Development Society in 1969 and the Rural Development Act of 1972, did it become a recognizable discipline folded into the Extension ranks. When I entered the fray in the early 2000s, we were still debating what to call ourselves (CRED, CRD, CD, CV???), what to focus on, and how to conduct ourselves (the CDS Principles of Good Practice).

So, I was somewhat surprised to hear Family and Consumer Sciences (FCS), known at Purdue as Health and Human Sciences (HHS), going through similar soul-searching. I recently overheard a leader describing how partnering with 4-H and Agriculture and Natural Resources could sustain FCS's relevance, then explained why Community Development was left out: "No one wants Community Development."

I responded that Purdue Extension is focusing on policy, systems, and environment work that directly intersects with Community Development, and that we are taking it a step further through our Community Vitality program, supported by the Downing Endowment, and through interdisciplinary work in placemaking, active living, health coalitions, recovery-oriented systems of care, disaster resilience, community planning, personal finance, mental health, community childcare, and more.

I realize that nobody wakes up wanting a facilitated planning process the way they want a 4-H Fair. But we have always tried to be stakeholder-focused, in the same way a good philanthropy is donor-driven. So we ask the following:

What do communities need, and what do they want and dream of?

Those are different questions. A county that cuts FCS funding while its life expectancy falls is not evidence that FCS is unneeded; it is evidence that wants and needs can diverge. While any parent of a teenager knows the important lesson of differentiating between wants and needs, a program area weighing its own relevance should also know the difference.

What communities need shows up plainly in the data. The 2024 NCR-Stat survey of 419 Indiana households finds Indiana trailing the North Central Region on all eight well-being indices, with the largest gaps in community satisfaction, mental health, and financial stress. Residents name housing affordability, job opportunities, and arts and culture as the low points. Rural Indiana's community satisfaction sits 0.20 below urban Indiana, the widest gap in the data. All of these point to Community Development and HHS programming. Nationally, the 4R-Stat baseline surveyed 18,596 households about how their lives are going, then examined which factors were associated with their answers. Some of what matters is HHS, including mental health, loneliness, physical health, and the strain of making ends meet. Some of it is Community Development, including whether people trust their neighbors and local institutions, feel welcome and treated fairly, take part in civic life, and are satisfied with the amenities and connectivity where they live. Both sets matter, and they matter independently. In other words, a person with good mental health and stable finances still reports lower well-being if the community around them is distrustful, unwelcoming, or poorly served, and the pattern holds in rural and urban places alike.

Community Development spent its first sixty years learning that relevance is not the same as being wanted. It is earned by being the honest broker when a community must decide something hard, by laying out alternatives and consequences, by answering "it depends," and by catalyzing rather than leading so the capacity stays behind when we leave.

Knowledge matters, but process drives impact. The path Purdue HHS Extension has chosen runs through policy, systems, and environmental change. At the same time, Community Development has always been focused on asset-based, community-engaged approaches and facilitative leadership as the means to a community-defined end. The want becomes visible when you ask the right questions and listen for the universal desire for individual and community well-being. The need, as the data show, belongs to neither program area alone. Relevance does not come from being wanted. It comes from being needed, and from showing up together.