2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

192 Strengthening Communities with Neighborhood Data
In a third location, an evaluation team of three was also assembled,
this time largely in response to local concerns regarding ethnic diversity
(the neighborhood being largely African American and Caribbean–West
Indian) and the desire to establish a team that the community would
see as legitimate. The team was led by a professor at a local university
(an African American seen to be respected in the community) who was
joined by researchers from two local nonprofit research organizations.
One of these organizations, which was seen as being “white,” was wellestablished
and had both the capacity to conduct a survey and specific
experience in community assessment in the city. The other was a new
organization based in the target neighborhood and run by West Indian
researchers well-known in the Caribbean–West Indian community. The
partnership eventually dissolved with the neighborhood-based organization
continuing as evaluator. Beyond the neighborhood survey,
evaluation activities ultimately focused on monitoring benchmarks of
planned activities (e.g., develop community newsletter; work with the
city to identify employment opportunities) rather than on the outcomes
such activities sought to achieve. Evaluation also included open-ended
interviews to glean the perceptions of participants and a small set of
residents about neighborhood change (Johnson and Johnson 1996).
At the fourth site, data meant to inform the planning process was
collected though asset-mapping surveys (McKnight 1987), windshield
surveys of housing and neighborhood conditions, and focus groups
with neighborhood youth. The early phase of the evaluation was organized
around the creation of a learning community meant to foster an
extended conversation among a small group of participants and community
members. In this way, the evaluation sought to assess initiative
progress through collecting, telling, and discussing stories of goals,
actions, and effects. 4 Later, in response to requests for more concrete
data, the evaluation began to focus on assisting implementing organizations
to establish basic management information systems with which
they (and the initiative more broadly, which sponsored these activities)
could track their activities and the users of their services. 5
These brief vignettes are too summary to give the dynamics behind
these choices and changes their due, but they do suggest some ways in
which a range of factors influences what is possible and what is ultimately
pursued with regard to neighborhood data for local evaluation. The relative
lack of focus on available data and neighborhood indicators and
more general focus on output benchmarks and participant perceptions