Key Takeaways and Results from the Community Needs Assessment
In late 2022 and early 2023, Edisto Island and Edisto Beach community member discussion on a variety of forums (social media, Charleston County public meetings, local group meetings) about whether the Edisto community would benefit from a proposed store on Edisto Island brought up many claims related to employment, food access and transportation access. The Edisto Island Community Association realized that some of these claims contradicted each other, and that there wasn’t any quantitative documentation of needs to help evaluate these claims. We decided to mail a needs assessment survey to try to quantify needs within the 29438-zip code (Edisto Island and Edisto Beach) and see if there were any patterns related to income, race and household location.
We mailed surveys to 1,747 addresses in the 29438 zip-code in May 2023. We received 174 responses. One response indicated that the household was not on Edisto, so that data was discarded. The 173 responses analyzed and presented in the results represent 173 households and 356 people. 118 households responded online. 55 households responded by mail.
Key Takeaways from Needs Assessment
86.1% of responding households (149 households) had adequate access to transportation, housing, food and medical care. 13.9% of responding households (24 households) did not have adequate access to transportation, housing, food and medical care.
While lack of access to transportation, housing, food and medical care was not found to be widespread by this survey, these issues do exist and are documented in the results. This organization believes these issues deserve attention and improvement in our community.
Lack of access to medical care was the most frequently reported challenge, with 21 households indicating lack of access. Medical care also generated many write-in comments, whether the household indicated that they lack access or not.
We found evidence that households with a range of incomes have access challenges. Lack of access to adequate medical care was indicated across all income levels.
Our data is mostly about people over the age of 65 with incomes higher than $93,000 a year which suggests that our data over represents higher income people, especially older people with higher incomes. We have received verbal feedback from some of our members that they believe there are more households with lower incomes and access challenges than represented in our results. Our data supports the idea that households with lower incomes have more access challenges; however inadequate access to medical care was found across all income levels.
White/Caucasian households are overrepresented in our results. The majority of respondents (88.4 % of households, representing 90.2% of people) indicated that their household was White/Caucasian. This is more than the Census estimate of a 75.1% White/Caucasian population for zip code 29438. Our results are inconclusive on if race influences access challenges. We have received verbal feedback from some of our members that Black/African American households have more access challenges than represented in the survey results.
We did not find evidence that household location (Charleston or Colleton County, Island or Town of Edisto Beach) influenced access challenges of responding households.
We did not find evidence of individuals looking for work at the time of the survey. We recognize that this may be due to a survey error (online survey did not include answer choice “unemployed and looking for work” in question about employment status). We also did not ask if currently employed people were looking for different or additional jobs. However, there were not any comments that directly indicated responding households had members looking for work. Work/Employment was selected most frequently (7 responses) as a reason someone in a household had moved away from Edisto. One respondent commented “I have to go off-island to find reliable employees.”
