This paper describes the assessment procedures used by the Child and Family Resource Program (CFRP) to identify and address the needs of families and of individual family members. CFRP was developed as part of the Head Start Improvement and Innovation effort to provide individualized comprehensive developmental services to families with children under 8 years of age. The paper is divided into eight sections. Section I presents the background and objectives of the CFRP system. Section II provides the rationale for the assessment of family needs. Section III describes the assessment procedure, which consists of four steps: enrollment/preassessment, development of a family action plan, implementation and follow-up, and reassessment of progress and needs. Sections IV and V list the objective and subjective data to be gathered about the family prior to the development of the family action plan. Section VI describes the composition of the assessment team. Section VII describes the anticipated effects of the assessment process in 27 areas of family life. The final section of the paper lists the staffing and training needs of the program for the development of adequate assessment staff. (BD)