One Collective Elgin is dedicated to gaining a deeper understanding of the community. Our vision is for every person in Elgin to have their voice heard, access the resources they need, and contribute meaningfully to the community. To support this vision, we began by actively listening to community members. The following report highlights what we learned.

The Assessment Setup

We asked each participant three questions: 

1. What are the top three to five biggest challenges in your community or in the city of Elgin? Which one would you address first?

2. What skills, resources, or strengths do you have that you would be willing to share to help solve problems in our community?

3. Where are you and others in your community finding hope right now? 

At the end of the interview, we invited participants to share their demographic information if they felt comfortable doing so. Sharing this information was completely voluntary.

Coding Responses 

After each member of the coding team read all of the lines of data, the codes were chosen based on collective decision-making. Then, all of the lines were read by each team member again in order to tabulate the number of times each theme was seen. Any doubts about how to code responses were resolved through team discussions.

Because the questions are open ended, people’s answers are sometimes counted in multiple code categories if they listed multiple problems or multiple resources/skills. What is counted is the number of responses that fit that code.

Question 1: What do you feel are the 3 biggest problems in Elgin?

Question 1 Continued: Which would you fix first?

Housing and homelessness continue to be Elgin’s number one concern based on our Needs Assessment. One Collective has listened and responded to this data through our Winter Shelter, which assists the homeless population during the cold Winter months. Below you can see exactly how One Collective Elgin is addressing these concerns based on our data from the 2025-2026 Winter season.

Question 2: What skills or resources do you have that you’re willing to contribute to solving problems in Elgin?

QuESTION 3: WHERE are you and/or the people in your community finding hope right now?

Limitations

• This project was led by community volunteers, not professional researchers or scientists. 

• Participants were not randomly selected. Instead we used a snowball method, which means interviewers invited people they knew to participate in those participants then recommended others. 

• As a result of this method, the findings cannot be assumed to reflect the views of everyone in Elgin. 

• Three members of the One Collective team reviewed and coded the responses. While we made every effort to approach the data to thoroughly and fairly, we recognized that personal perspectives and experiences can influence how information is interpreted and organized.