2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

Introduction to the Field 3
into an orderly information system, make the data available for use,
and keep the data up to date. The first entity to fulfill this commitment
was a community-oriented university research center: the Center
on Urban Poverty and Social Change at Case Western University
in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1992. For the first time, it became possible to
track changing neighborhood conditions annually, between censuses,
by using a variety of indicators (a development first documented by
Coulton in 1995).
As the work got under way, this university-based center was part of
the Community Planning and Action Program, a small network of local
groups funded by the Rockefeller Foundation to develop local solutions
to emerging concerns about concentrated urban poverty in several
US cities. Three of these groups (from Boston, Massachusetts; Denver,
Colorado; and Oakland, California), inspired by the neighborhood
indicators idea and the progress being made in Cleveland, decided to
build similar systems. Members of the Community Planning and Action
Program then became aware of similar developments in Atlanta, Georgia,
and Providence, Rhode Island, and met with their representatives
to explore ideas about how the approach might be strengthened and
spread to other places. 2
They decided it would make sense to form a new network of organizations
doing this work, but that to be sustainable the network
should be based in an established public policy research institute.
They asked the Urban Institute if it would be interested in playing
that role. The Urban Institute, a nonprofit research organization that
seeks to foster sound public policy and effective government, seemed
a good fit for the organization’s mission. After a period of study, the
Institute agreed, and they jointly formed the National Neighborhood
Indicators Partnership (NNIP) in early 1996. The Institute study of
what the partners were accomplishing yielded the partnership’s first
guidebook, Building and Operating Neighborhood Indicator Systems
(Kingsley 1999).
Although NNIP partner organizations used their data to address
policy and programmatic issues at various levels, a primary motivation
of the partnership was to bring data to bear to improve conditions in
distressed low-income neighborhoods. Their theme was “democratizing
information,” implying a commitment to directly engage neighborhood
practitioners and residents in using data in community improvement
efforts. 3