2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

Using Data for City and Regional Strategies 233
healthy weight and fitness for children is a long-term undertaking, but
with the right data, collaborative institutions, and strong leadership in
place, the Austin region has begun to see some gains in the indicators.
Over a five-year period, the percentage of students in the healthy fitness
zone for BMI has increased from 60 to 61 percent; that increase was
accompanied by an increase in the percentage of low-income children of
about 4 percent. The percentage of students in the cardiovascular healthy
zone increased from 62 to 71 percent, but a change in the calculation of
aerobic capacity influenced those results. COH analyses and presentation
of school and neighborhood indicators served as both a catalyst
to action, a tool for targeting interventions, and a way to measure the
effectiveness of school and community activities. The relationships that
stakeholders have cultivated are now being leveraged to launch further
additional projects to help vulnerable children, including building an
integrated data system to support case management in programs to
reduce family residential and school instability.
Case Study: Motivating Community Action to Address
Neighborhood Disparities in Dallas, Texas
While the Austin actors mobilized their community starting from the
single-issue area of children’s health, other advocates have scanned multiple
aspects of community well-being through a place-based lens. Such was
the case in Dallas, where neighborhood indicators presented in a compelling
way motivated a coalition of stakeholders, including the Dallas Morning
News, to work on addressing the disparities between the affluent north
side of Dallas and the distressed neighborhoods on the south side. 15
The Foundation for Community Empowerment, the original NNIP
partner in Dallas, was founded by real estate developer Don Williams to
facilitate large-scale system change through empowering neighborhood
residents. In 2005, the foundation established the J. McDonald Williams
Institute as a source of objective research and policy recommendations
relevant to urban revitalization and quality of life. The institute’s staff
noted how the national media helped to elevate the issues of disparity
between rich and poor neighborhoods in the wake of Hurricane Katrina
in August 2005. Dallas faced similar challenges of limited opportunity in
poor neighborhoods, but in the absence of a televised natural disaster,
the city’s disparities were not getting public attention.