2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

406 Strengthening Communities with Neighborhood Data
6. Establish a network to strengthen neighborhood research.
Once the coalition has been established and is working with universities
to strengthen their curricula in the practice side of this field, it
should be in a good position to propose and help establish a new network
to strengthen neighborhood research. A network is needed that
fosters methodological development that transcends substantive areas
and promotes exchanges between individuals in academia, policy settings,
local data intermediaries, foundations, and government agencies
that study, operate, and invest in neighborhood programming.
As noted in chapter 7, those who have contributed to this work to date
come from many institutional settings and academic disciplines. There is
a need for new mechanisms to facilitate communication among them. As
a first step, the coalition should identify the scientific societies that already
have interest groups or forums on community-based research that could
be supported and connected by a developing network. It then should
meet early with the leading scholars who have made key contributions
to date to discuss possible mission statements, organizational structures,
and priority activities. These activities could mobilize disparate efforts to
address the major areas in need of development identified in chapter 7:
• Developing more neighborhood concepts with uniform definitions
and standardized measures and encouraging their widespread use;
• Taking advantage of potential for more fine-grained and dynamic
spatial analysis;
• Amplifying and extending our ability to address the counterfactual
problem in order to greatly strengthen evaluations of practices and
policies; and
• Advancing the analytic methods needed to provide understanding
of the dynamic processes that shape neighborhoods, thereby
building the capacity to model the process of neighborhood change
holistically.
7. Provide funding to catalyze local institutional development and
incentivize innovation.
The coalition’s information campaign should be designed to encourage
the federal and state governments to support building local data
intermediary capacity—support that would add to and incentivize
expanded investment by local and national philanthropies. At present,
most communities do not have these capabilities at all. In the places that