2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

84 Strengthening Communities with Neighborhood Data
accountability. Coulton (2008) provides a comprehensive overview of
administrative data sources. She documents issues to consider when
repurposing administrative data, including the lack of metadata and
the need to protect the confidentiality of individuals’ data. The report
provides sample indicators and likely source agencies for data files in
eight categories: economy, education, health, social services, safety and
security, community resources and participation, housing, and environment.
In addition, NNIP has published guidebooks over the years that
give advice and examples on specific data sources. 3
Multiagency program service data, consisting of client-level observations
of publicly funded services, represent another type of administrative
data. These data may be entered by a city agency providing a
service directly or by a collection of nonprofits that is contracted by local
governments to provide services, such as mental health or child welfare
services. A prominent example of these data is the Homeless Management
Information System, required by HUD to be maintained by local
Continuum of Care lead organizations (US Department of Housing and
Urban Development n.d.a). The Homeless Management Information
System results from a 2001 Congressional mandate that HUD work with
jurisdictions to gather more detailed homeless data by 2004. Although
these data are less commonly used to create neighborhood indicators, they
often contain addresses and could provide insight into spatial patterns of
service provision or supportive housing.
Many issue areas have seen impressive progress over the last decade
in increasing access and reuse of administrative data for neighborhood
indicators. NNIP partners, for example, use data from many local and
state government sources and turn them into useful indicators. (See
table 3.2 for an NNIP partners’ data inventory.) An illustration of how
state and local data have been used by multiple partners comes from the
Reentry Mapping Network, a collaborative effort by the Urban Institute
and community-based organizations in 15 cities. At the outset of
this project, no NNIP partner organization had access to administrative
records of data from prisons or jails. However, community organizations
recognized that having individuals, particularly young men of color,
cycling through incarceration and reentry hampered their improvement
efforts in low-income neighborhoods. In response to these concerns, the
Reentry Mapping Network was designed to instigate community change
through the mapping and analysis of neighborhood-level data on prisoner
reentry. Reentry Mapping Network partners collected and analyzed