A Needs Assessment (for volunteers and members) is a structured way to discover what a person needs in order to participate safely, sustainably, and with dignity, and to translate that into practical support, role design, and mutual expectations.
In Hitchhiker terms, this is not “assessing the community” but caring for the individual contributor: the Fellow, the volunteer, the organiser, the newcomer, the quietly brilliant person on the edge of burnout, or the precarious member who cannot afford hidden costs.
This kind of needs assessment is especially important when we want to welcome and retain Neurodiversity and Precarity as first-class realities rather than awkward exceptions.
# Why Hitchhikers needs this Volunteer systems often fail not because people lack motivation, but because the work environment contains invisible barriers: unclear expectations, unpredictable communication, sensory overload, meetings that punish processing differences, tasks that require unpaid time, or “help” that arrives as pressure.
A personalised needs assessment turns inclusion from a slogan into a workflow: we explicitly map the friction points that make participation expensive for a given person, then redesign roles, rhythms, and support so that contribution becomes possible.
This is not charity and not surveillance. It is a mutual fit process: > What do you need to thrive here, and what can we reliably offer, without making promises we cannot keep..
# The unit of analysis The unit is the person in context, not their diagnosis, not a category, and not an abstract “volunteer type.”. We care about constraints and affordances: time, money, energy, executive function, social bandwidth, sensory tolerance, caregiving load, housing insecurity, device access, language, safety, and confidence.
We also care about strengths: what the person loves, what they can do in flow, what kind of contribution gives them pride, and what kinds of recognition actually feel good to them.
# Personalised in the age of AI AI helps when it reduces burden and improves clarity, not when it pretends to be a clinician. A good pattern is an adaptive conversation that asks fewer questions, remembers the person’s preferences, and produces a human-readable Participation Pact the person can edit, redact, and own.
Personalisation means the output is specific: “When I’m overloaded I go quiet; ping me once, then wait 24 hours.” “I can do deep work but not meetings.” “I can volunteer 2 hours every fortnight if tasks are well-scoped.” “I need written instructions and a buddy for the first month.”.
# What we are actually assessing We are assessing the conditions for healthy contribution. This includes: stability needs (cashflow, transport, childcare), cognitive needs (clarity, structure, pacing), sensory needs (audio/video settings, meeting length), communication needs (async-first, time to respond), and governance needs (boundaries, conflict safety, predictable decision making). For precarious members, needs assessment must also surface hidden costs: software subscriptions, hardware, travel, unpaid onboarding time, or pressure to be “always available.”. For neurodiverse members, the most common needs are often not “special tools” but simple reliability: clear definitions of done, explicit priority, fewer context switches, and permission to communicate differently.
# Outputs that matter A needs assessment is only useful if it changes the work. Outputs should be short, concrete, and operational: preferred channels, response-time norms, meeting preferences, task shapes that fit, escalation pathways, and the exact support offers Hitchhikers can actually honour. A strong output is a one-page Working Agreement between the person and the group, plus a role backlog that can be taken on in small, well-defined slices. Another strong output is a Red Flags List that tells leaders what not to do with this person, without demanding that the person repeatedly explain themselves.
# Guardrails Consent and control are non-negotiable: the member owns their needs profile and decides what is shared, with whom, and for how long. Data minimisation matters: we don’t need medical stories. We need actionable constraints and preferences. The assessment must never become an eligibility test or a loyalty probe. The moment people fear consequences, they will mask, and the system will break.
# Hitchhiker practice patterns Make it normal. Every Fellow and volunteer gets the same respectful onboarding conversation, so neurodiverse and precarious members are not singled out. Make it reversible. People can update their needs profile as life changes, without shame, without “explaining the change.”. Make it supported. Pair needs assessment with a named Buddy or Steward who helps translate needs into workable tasks and protects boundaries when pressure rises. Make it visible in the work system. Needs must map into task design, meeting norms, and documentation style, or they will be forgotten at the exact moment they matter.
# Failure modes The biggest failure is collecting needs and changing nothing, which teaches people not to trust the process. Another failure is over-promising support and then disappearing, which harms precarious members disproportionately. A subtler failure is treating needs as fixed identity instead of context: today’s “I can’t do meetings” might become “I can do one short meeting a month” once trust and predictability exist.
# See - Fellows, Volunteers and Fish - Onboarding and Working Agreement - Neurodiversity and Precarity - Psychological Safety and Safeguarding - Buddy and Steward - Human Centred - Agentic Development and Personal AI