2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

402 Strengthening Communities with Neighborhood Data
of national foundations that have funded the strengthening of local data
capacity in the past and relevant federal agencies should also be involved
from the outset.
Finally, national networks of local actors could help reach out to their
memberships, including those that represent local civic funders, such as
community foundations and United Ways; local governments, such as
the National League of Cities and the International City/County Management
Association; and local nonprofits, such as LISC and Enterprise.
As noted in chapter 3, proactive efforts are needed to make sure that
the increased access to data and exciting new technology contribute to
inclusive community improvement. Thus, we believe that the coalition’s
mission statement should prioritize using data to address the problems
of low-income neighborhoods and do so in a way that emphasizes
the engagement of residents and neighborhood organizations. Our
suggestions about the program elements are as follows:
1. Inform local civic leaders about the potentials of a more effective
data environment.
The coalition would need to develop the capacity to inform a broad
array of entities by making presentations on strengthening the local data
environment at national conferences of the relevant institutions and
writing articles, blogs, and guides on the topic for membership publications
and websites.
The groups that represent local civic funders would communicate with
their local affiliates, share relevant materials, and encourage them to participate
in coalition-sponsored activities that illustrate the role of local data
intermediaries and the benefits of an enhanced local data environment.
2. Develop and connect networks to document and disseminate local
best practices and provide technical assistance and training to local data
intermediaries.
As explained in chapter 2, these are activities that NNIP does now,
albeit on a much smaller scale than is called for to achieve the goal
set forth at the beginning of this section. There are lessons here for
the coalition as it attempts to build mechanisms to support improved
practice in a much broader range of localities, but simply spreading the
NNIP model to other places, per se, may not be the best way to increase
scale. For example, a group of separate but related networks (perhaps
subdivided by region or size of city) might make more sense than one