2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

58 Strengthening Communities with Neighborhood Data
CURA, the lead local partner in the National Neighborhood Indicators
Partnership (NNIP) in the Twin Cities area, quickly got to work providing
assistance in the tornado response effort. It created and distributed
maps that helped responders identify the needs of the community (such
as where food, clean water, and clothing were needed), the severity of
each house’s damage, and the locations of suspected vacant properties
and rental housing.
CURA’s assistance was vital to the response effort because few, if any,
organizations or government departments were adequately positioned
to pull together the information and data needed for the post-tornado
response. The urgent circumstances of this natural disaster required
immediate action, but CURA’s help would not have been possible without
the presence of an active data-sharing environment that had developed
in the Twin Cities over the preceding decades. In fact, if the tornado
had struck 15 years earlier, CURA’s help would have largely been limited
to on-the-ground support.
This essay traces the history and current status of the data-sharing
environment in the Twin Cities, 2 with a particular emphasis on the
current landscape of nonprofit intermediaries, like CURA, that apply
community data to improve neighborhoods throughout the Twin Cities
metropolitan region. What emerges is a picture of a data-sharing
environment that developed organically, starting with key decisions
made by state-level government entities and continuing to the dataoriented
projects that nonprofit intermediaries undertake to address
community needs.
Taking Root in State Initiatives
Community data users in the Twin Cities metropolitan region may take
for granted the abundance of data at their disposal, but access to community
information has not always been as easy as downloading a ready-touse
geographic information system (GIS) file or opening up a regularly
distributed dataset. In fact, the current data-sharing environment in the
Twin Cities owes much to actions undertaken decades ago by a handful
of state and regional government agencies and professional associations.
Collectively, their actions achieved three important and necessary steps
in shaping the current data-sharing atmosphere: establishing important
standards for recording and annotating data, forging the interagency and