2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

186 Strengthening Communities with Neighborhood Data
(Connell et al. 1995; Federal Reserve 2011; Kingsley 1998; Sawicki and
Craig 1996). This agenda presents both opportunities and challenges.
Some are conceptual, such as around key aspects of community change
goals and how best to measure them. Others are more technical, such as
around data access and analysis. Yet others are interactional, entailing
contextual, political, and organizational influences that shape interests,
priorities, expectations, and use of data in these contexts.
This essay explores some of the dynamics around using data for various
purposes in community-change efforts. Drawing on several empirical
examples, it interrogates some of the principal ideas, uses, tensions,
and dynamics that inform data use and some key aspects of process and
capacity that need to be recognized and addressed. First, it outlines some
arguments for the importance of neighborhood data in locally driven
community-change efforts and some of the principal uses to which data
might be put. It then considers some challenges and tensions that may be
encountered in seeking to harness data and analysis for these purposes.
Next, it explores the uses of and dynamics around data collection and
analysis in the service of community-change efforts, drawing on three
brief examples of CBO and CCI action. Finally, it distills some potential
implications suggested by these efforts to improve data use and analysis
for community change.
Rationale and Intent
The increasing interest in better harnessing neighborhood-level data
to support neighborhood-change efforts is part of a broader return
to community that has taken place over the past 25 years. Research on
neighborhood effects and the problems associated with concentrated
urban poverty (e.g., Jencks and Mayer 1990; Sampson, Morenoff, and
Gannon-Rowley 2002; Wilson 1987), as well as research on changes in
civic engagement and the nature of community in contemporary society
(Putnam 2000; Wellman 1979), have been accompanied by support
for a number of efforts. These efforts—large and small, funded by philanthropy
and government, focused on a range of social problems and
goals—have been grounded in local communities as both sites and targets
of change. Community-based efforts across this spectrum treat the
local community (often an urban neighborhood) as both the context
for and the principle around which practice should be organized. As