2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

Using Data for Neighborhood Improvement 197
that used the relative interests and capacities of each partner, this balance
was complicated by the timeline and accountability pressures of
external funding that supported the partnership as the CBOs came up
against the quotidian pressures of CBO activities and other demands
on their time and resources. The combination of these factors suggests
that in order to strengthen CBOs’ ability to gain access to and use
research for planning, fundraising, advocacy, and assessment, capacity
needs to be built explicitly for this purpose beyond their core organizational
structure that will give them access to data, technical assistance,
and analytic support and on which they can call for their purposes and
on their terms.
Neighborhood Data as a Tool for Social Action
The final case considers the use of neighborhood data as an instrumental
resource to mobilize local constituencies and shape advocacy campaigns
designed to catalyze policy responses, in this case, in response to the
disproportionate impact of the foreclosure crisis on a neighborhood targeted
by predatory and unregulated lending. Neighborhood data here
served multiple purposes: they were harnessed for situational analysis,
used as a community organizing tool, and leveraged to frame and support
a particular causal story that challenged existing responses to the
foreclosure crisis and argued for the need—and identified the actors
responsible—for enacting a different solution.
The effort was driven by the Southwest Organizing Project (SWOP),
a CBO with a more than 20-year history of community organizing and
advocacy in its neighborhood. SWOP, along with the Greater Southwest
Community Development Corporation, which was well-established in
the neighborhood, served as lead agencies for the New Communities
Program (NCP), a multisite CCI led by LISC Chicago and funded by
the MacArthur Foundation. As an initiative, NCP has a strong data
orientation, emphasizing the value of data in informing planning and
implementation (with later phases of NCP increasingly focused on
data-driven planning and performance management) and supporting
a major evaluation. SWOP was provided support both under NCP and
separately from the MacArthur Foundation to pursue its foreclosure
work. The focus on data to inform organizing around foreclosures, however,
began before SWOP’s involvement in NCP. The effort to address
the foreclosure crisis built directly on work in the 1990s to address