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Please post any comments relevant to the Needs Assessment Task Force here.

The Needs Assessment Task Force Executive Summary is now available for comment. Anyone who has participated in the Task Forces (both Standards Committee members and observers) is welcome to post their comments relative to the Executive Summary below, or to submit them to Amanda Raster (amanda@leonardoacademy.org) in a 'track changes' Word version of the document. Comments related to the content of the document (issues addressed that should not be, issues not addressed that should be, points of clarification, etc) will be most useful; please avoid making editorial corrections.

All comments received by APRIL 30th will be reviewed by the Needs Assessment Task Force writing subgroup and considered for the final document.

This summary, which I suspect only hints at the task force's wide-ranging discusions, provideds a great service by beginning to organize the disparate ideas and issues considered in the task force's process. I certainly appreciate the difficult job the drafting committee took on as well as their result. Recognizing that is always easier to comment on someone else's draft than to do the drafting, I nevertheless have some thoughts on the overall purpose and organization of this document that I submit for your consideration:

1. The title "executive summary" suggests a longer supporting document of which this is the summary, but I don't know of such a document. Maybe this should be an "issues summary" or "results summary".

2, The core of this document seems to me to be section 2, which addresses the basic question "who needs a standard of sustainability in agriculture?" (the second of the questions specified in the overview). Section 4 augments section 2 by comparing the needs of supply chain stakeholders to end-product consumer stakeholders. Section 3 takes the dicussion to a new level in discussing what form of standard would best meet the identified needs.

3. Section 2 further specifies questions whose answers would address the basic question in the overview of who needs the standard. However, the document does not appear to propose answers to these questions, at least not directly, as far as I can see. Perhaps it was a conscious decision to outline the questions and leave the answers to the Standards Committee, but I think it would be highly useful if section 2 provided answers for the Committee members and other participants to consider. It would also help to distinguish the subject matter of this document from that of the Mission and Principles task force (see 4. below)

4. Section 1's list of basic needs and Section 3's list of possible outcomes seem more like goals of the process or of the potential standard. I suggest integrating them into the Mission and Principles (and Goals) task force's work product.

Thanks again for all the hard work and for considering these comments. --Don Hodge