|
NNIP PARTNER SPOTLIGHT
The Center for Community Building and Neighborhood Action (CBANA) Institutional Setting The Center for Community Building and Neighborhood Action (CBANA), housed in the School of Urban Affairs and Public Policy at The University of Memphis, grew out of individual faculty interests in community-based research and partnerships. CBANA "links university research with community action," with an emphasis on "researcher-practitioner collaboration, partnerships with community-based organizations, and citizen engagement through participatory research." The Center specializes in research on neighborhoods, housing, and quality of life issues that impact Memphis and Shelby County, with a special emphasis on weak markets, smart growth, and poverty. Since its inception in 2002, CBANA has designed and implemented data-driven interventions and supported changes in state and local policies; provided research support and technical assistance for strategic evaluation of collaborative projects; established a growing, multi-disciplinary corps of student interns in community-based, community development-oriented placements; and partnered with public and non-profit agencies and organizations such as the City of Memphis Division of Housing and Community Development, the Memphis Housing Authority, the HUD Memphis Field Office, the Bankruptcy Court for the Western District of Tennessee, the Memphis Shelby Crime Commission, the District Attorney General, the Memphis Police Department, the Memphis Community Development Partnership, the Community Development Council and its member community development corporations and neighborhood-based organizations, Memphis Area Legal Services, the RISE Foundation, the Community Foundation of Greater Memphis, the Women's Foundation of Greater Memphis, the Institute for Women's Health, and The Urban Child Institute. Signature products include neighborhood profiles and asset maps in conjunction with various community and neighborhood initiatives, a "problem properties audit" protocol for use by community groups, neighborhood effects analysis for HOPE VI sites, and most recently the design and implementation of the "Property Transfer Database" - a key tool for CBANA's Neighborhood Housing Markets Modeling Project, supported by the Brookings Institution's Urban Markets Initiative. The PTD uses public records in new ways to uncover the micro and macro dynamics of neighborhood housing markets (with a special emphasis on the role of predatory lending and foreclosure), and is being piloted in both a transitional neighborhood and a more classically depressed neighborhood. Findings from the PTD are driving the Southeast Memphis Initiative, a comprehensive community initiative emerging from collaborative discussions among community-based stakeholders, city government, non-profits, CBANA, SUAPP's Center for Community Criminology, and other SUAPP faculty. CBANA is also involved in survey research on bankruptcy (with the Memphis DEBTS Collaborative) and a cohort study of neighborhood effects on early childhood development (with the University of Tennessee Health Science Center and The Urban Child Institute.) InfoWorks Memphis and the Shared Urban Data System The neighborhood emphasis of the Brookings project and other initiatives is a natural springboard for a more comprehensive set of community and neighborhood indicators. Ten topical areas are under continued development for systematic web-based dissemination and framing toward actionable knowledge. InfoWorks Memphis Community and Neighborhood Indicators is based on government data such as Census and American Community Survey, American Housing Survey, and Home Mortgage Disclosure Act; local administrative records such as those from the Memphis Housing Authority and Division of Housing and Community Development and the Memphis Police Department Incident-Based Reporting System (in conjunction with the Center for Community Criminology); and primary data collection through the Problem Properties Audit and the Mid-South Survey (a project of the Center for Community Criminology.) The platform for InfoWorks Memphis is the University of Memphis-designed and hosted Shared Urban Data System (SUDS), which houses a number of stand-alone data resources (both public access and password protected) and which includes GIS mapping and other interactive capabilities. Phyllis Betts, founding Director of the Center for Community Building and Neighborhood Action and InfoWorks Memphis in the School of Urban Affairs and Public Policy at The University of Memphis, earned her PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago, where she was a graduate research assistant for the South Shore Project. The South Shore Project documented the emergence and impact of development banking (South Shore National Bank, now ShoreBank) on investment and quality of life in the South Shore neighborhood of Chicago. She has been engaged in community-based research and action in Memphis since 1996. She is the Principal Investigator for CBANA projects outlined above, combining research and outreach with community partners in the tradition of "engaged scholarship." Recent scholarship includes a comprehensive study of "under-enforceability," goal displacement, and impression management in urban housing code enforcement and other anti-blight strategies (originally developed in Fixing Broken Windows: Strategies to Strengthen Housing Code Enforcement and Related Approaches to Community-Based Crime Prevention, commissioned by the Memphis Shelby Crime Commission). Fixing Broken Windows is a CBANA prototype for transforming data to create actionable knowledge, and is the foundation for a major city-wide Joint Task Force for Problem Properties (co-chaired by the Division Director for Housing and Community Development for the City of Memphis and the District Attorney General for Shelby County). Her work with the Brookings Institution's Neighborhood Housing Markets Modeling Project is helping to drive the agenda for the Anti-Predatory Lending Coalition (originating out of Memphis but about to go statewide in support of state legislation). Betts co-coordinates the Southeast Memphis Initiative, a comprehensive community initiative in a large transitional neighborhood in Memphis, and was the research coordinator for the Fannie Mae Foundation's Asset Mapping Project in College Park (a HOPE VI revitalization area.) She is the "neighborhood effects" evaluator for four HOPE VI program sites in Memphis, and has also done logic modeling, asset mapping, and program evaluation for the Community Foundation of Greater Memphis, the Women's Foundation for a Greater Memphis, and the Rockefeller Institute for Public Policy, and for programs supported by Pew Charitable Trusts and the Ford Foundation. Richard Janikowski, founding Director of the Center for Community Criminology and Research (School of Urban Affairs and Public Policy, the University of Memphis) and the Shared Urban Data System (The University of Memphis), has a degree in political science from Loyola University and a JD from DePaul University. Janikowski has been involved in community-based research and action in Memphis since 1997. The former chair of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, he consults nationally for the Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Programs on data-driven problem solving for community safety and was the Principal Investigator for DOJ's Community Safety Information Systems in Memphis, one of the first DOJ projects to include mapping and other web-based technology for data-driven problem-solving. Janikowski has been instrumental in defining community safety broadly to include prevention, with an emphasis on early childhood and youth development. As such he is the evaluator or provides research support for a broad range of community-based programs in early childhood and youth development, including Shelby County Department of Children's Services' "Family to Family" project, on permanency placement strategy for children in foster care supported by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Other projects include Weed and Seed and Project Safe Neighborhoods. Janikowski co-coordinates, with Betts, the Southeast Memphis Initiative (see above.) TK Buchanan is community outreach coordinator for the Center for Community Building and Neighborhood Action, and has been the on-the-ground person for implementation of projects such as Problem Property Audits in over ten Memphis neighborhoods. She is working on her master's degree in sociology from The University of Memphis. Cindy Martin is coordinator for the Shared Urban Data System, and has been the technical force behind the design and implementation of the system. With a bachelor's degree in management information systems, Cindy worked with information systems until returning to the University of Memphis to earn a master's degree in applied urban anthropology. Her work with SUDS integrates her technical and substantive interests. |
