New Report on Voter Participation in Camden City

NOVEMBER 2003 - CAMConnect has released a new report documenting voter participation in the different neighborhoods of Camden City. The report features maps, charts, and tables showing levels of voter participation for elections since 1997, and is available in PDF format on CAMConnect's website, http://www.camconnect.org.

Among the findings of the report:

• Residents in Camden City vote at a lower rate than residents of adjacent municipalities or other jurisdictions in Camden County. However, the voter participation rate in Camden is comparable to that of other similar communities in New Jersey, such as Paterson, Elizabeth, and Trenton.

• Although the rate of voter participation in Camden City is lower than surrounding communities, the rate of voter registration is not. This suggests that efforts to improve voter turnout in Camden must focus on education and getting citizens to the polls, not just on registration drives.

• Age is an indicator of voting tendencies. Residents in the neighborhood of Parkside, which has a relatively large population of people over 50 voted at a higher rate than did residents of East Camden and Cramer Hill, which have lower median ages.

• Residents in primarily Latino neighborhoods of Camden are less likely to be registered and less likely to vote than residents of primarily African-American neighborhoods or neighborhoods of mixed ethnicity.

• Voter participation varies greatly between different elections. Participation peaked in the 2000 Presidential election, when 33 percent of the voting age population actually voted. Participation has likely been affected by the perceived quality and background of the candidates and voter apathy following political scandals. Participation reached 25 percent of the voting age population during the 1997 Mayoral race with five candidates including one Latino, three African-Americans, and one Caucasian, representing a spectrum of demographic groups of the City. In the following Mayoral election of 2001, turnout plummeted to 15 percent when only two candidates were on the ballot, both African-American. The drop-off was particularly significant in predominately Latino sections of the City.

"The voter participation report is a clear reflection of CAMConnect's mission, which is to link communities with information that is collected but not readily available," said Program Manager Derek Ziegler. "We hope that the findings of this report will spark a larger community-wide dialogue about how to improve voter turnout in Camden." CAMConnect has already presented the findings of the report to some neighborhood resident leaders and is exploring other methods of community engagement.

Jerome Harris, Chairman of CAMConnect's Board of Trustees and adjunct professor of Political Science at Rowan University, observed that "voter participation is an significant indicator of the level of civic engagement of Camden residents. Camden's political and civic organizations must work to increase voter participation as part of the city's recovery."

"This report shows that when Camden residents feel they have a stake in the outcome of an election, they vote with their feet and come out to the polls," said Dr. Jeff Brenner, a community physician and a Board member of CAMConnect. "A turnout of 45 percent of registered voters during the last Presidential race flies in the face of stereotypes of persistent, massive voter disinterest in Camden."

CAMConnect, a member of the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership, is dedicated to creating a learning partnership in the City of Camden in order to foster public policy, to help in the development of programming and services, and to evaluate the effectiveness of decisions and improvements in Camden City. To find out more about CamConnect and view previous neighborhood reports, visit the web site at http://www.camconnect.org.

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Greater New Orleans Community Data Center Receives TOP Grant

OCTOBER 2003 - The Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, an NNIP partner, has been awarded a $600,000 grant from the Technology Opportunities Program (TOP) at the U.S. Department of Commerce.

The Data Center's primary mission is to support informed decision-making in the New Orleans nonprofit sector. Their web site (www.gnocdc.org) currently holds more than 35,000 pieces of demographic, housing, health and crime data about New Orleans' 73 neighborhoods, as well as the 10-parish area.

This prestigious three-year grant will allow the Data Center to work with community partners to augment the data currently on their web site with 1) new data to illustrate racial inequities 2) interactive maps of neighborhood assets and 3) resident explanations of the stories behind the numbers.

"This expansion of the common platform of neighborhood level data is a critical resource for our region. It is only through using innovation and technology that we will be able to extend our limited local resources to begin to meet New Orleans' needs." Gary Ostroske, President of the United Way for the Greater New Orleans Area.

Charlotte Cunliffe, director of the Data Center, notes that "Data is used to make decisions at many levels - decisions about where money goes, who has access to what resources, and so on. We're creating a common platform of trustworthy information so that we can come to agreement on what our problems are and where the solutions might be."

The Community Data Center is part of a national movement toward democratizing data. Access to data has traditionally been limited to people with power, and even today, when reams of data are available to the public, there are still significant barriers to the public using that data. One of the barriers to access, ironically, is the technology itself that is used to disseminate data.

The Data Center focuses on how to support people's natural information-seeking strategies with an easy-to-use data resource and information to help people - especially nonprofits - use data well. "Data is complex enough - we don't want to force people to jump through costly technical hoops and decipher cryptic interfaces to get the information they need." Denice Warren, information systems designer for the Data Center.

And if the web site statistics for gnocdc.org could speak, they'd say that people are indeed finding gnocdc.org a useful place to go for data, as it receives more than 4,000 unique visits per month. "Not bad for a site full of numbers!" notes Ms. Warren.

The Data Center is locally supported by Baptist Community Ministries, the United Way for the Greater New Orleans area, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.

To read the project narrative, visit: www.ntiaotiant2.ntia.doc.gov/top/awards/details.com?oeam=226003020

To learn more about the Community Data Center, visit: www.gnocdc.org

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Boston Foundation Honored As Finalist In Prestigious Awards Competition

SEPTEMBER 2003 - The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, CA, recently announced that the Boston Indicators Project has been named a "Tech Laureate", one of the 25 finalists in the internationally recognized Tech Museum Awards. The finalists are honored "for applying technology to profoundly improve the human condition in categories of education, equality, environment, economic development and health." More than 500 companies, institutions and non-profit organizations from 70 countries from around the world competed for the awards this year.

The Indicators Project is one of the finalists in the Equality category, which acknowledges work that combats human rights violations and improves the local democratic process. A winner in each of the five categories will be chosen and announced at a black tie gala at the Tech Museum in San Jose on October 15, and will receive a $50,000 cash prize.

This is a significant achievement on the part of the Boston Indicators Project team -- Charlotte Kahn, Geeta Pradhan, Hadley Clark and Courtney Mallen -- and their partners in the community, especially the City of Boston and the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, who have all worked so hard over the last year to make this data resource come alive via the new www.bostonindicators.org website. Their aim has been to democratize data and use it for the benefit of the community, and this recognition underscores the importance of that work.

The Boston Indicators Project is a civic initiative to engage the general public, community-based institutions, the media, business, and government in better understanding Boston’s key challenges and opportunities through shared access to high quality objective data. In addition to producing a biennial Indicators Report, the Project engages residents, civic, business and community leaders, government officials and academics in dialogue about how to identify and respond to the city and region’s unique challenges and opportunities. It also sponsors an educational curriculum and a seminar series, and conducts Boston tours for media professionals.

For the full press release and more information about the awards, visit the Tech Museum web site at www.techawards.thetech.org/press_release.cfm?id=46.

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NNIP Report on Neighborhoods and Health

SEPTEMBER 2003 - The Urban Institute has issued a report entitled, "Neighborhoods and Health: Building Evidence for Local Policy." Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the report is the final product of a cross-site project conducted by the Urban Institute and five partners in the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP). The project had two major purposes: (1) to contribute to expanding the range and usefulness of health indicators available at the neighborhood level in America's localities, and (2) to gain greater understanding of the relationships between characteristics of neighborhoods and health outcomes. Project work was divided into two components -- site-specific analyses and cross-site analysis.

SITE-SPECIFIC ANALYSIS
Site-specific analysis entailed assembling and analyzing new neighborhood-level indicators pertaining to local health issues in each site and using the data to further local health improvement initiatives. The participating partner cities were Cleveland, Denver, Indianapolis, Oakland, and Providence.

Cleveland’s Center on Urban Poverty and Social Change developed neighborhood indicators of child access to primary care using eligibility, claims, and encounter data from Ohio’s Medicaid system. Denver’s Piton Foundation examined new datasets with information on environmental conditions and analyzed new indicators related to community violence. Indianapolis’s Polis Center used spatial analysis to study the relationship between community conditions and obesity in children. Oakland’s Urban Strategies Council focused on the relationship between neighborhood conditions and the incidence of tuberculosis using a new “kernel density” method to depict disease intensities in the form of contour intervals. Finally, The Providence Plan used records of birth outcomes linked to records on subsequent care to analyze the extent of residential mobility among young children and the relationships between mobility, the delivery of child health care services, and other factors.

CROSS-SITE ANALYSIS
Cross-site analysis entailed researching the changing urban context in each of the five sites, examining relationships between metropolitan and neighborhood conditions and health outcomes in a comparable manner across sites, and developing a neighborhood disparity index. Researchers examined the trends and differences between high-poverty and nonpoor areas for five key indicators: teen birthrates, rates of early prenatal care, rates of low-birth-weight births, infant mortality rates, and age-adjusted mortality rates.

The study’s major findings are as follows: (1) Health problems in high-poverty neighborhoods were more severe for almost all indicators in all cities, although the extent of the gaps varied; (2) The 1990s saw notable improvements in maternal and infant health indicators in both the high-poverty and nonpoor neighborhoods in almost all cities with generally faster rates of improvement in high-poverty areas; (3) A city’s racial composition and unique programmatic efforts seem to influence rates of improvement in health outcomes.

Low-birth-weight birth trends over the 1990s exhibit notable differences across sites. Low-birth-weight rates declined in Cleveland, Denver, and Oakland but increased in Indianapolis and Providence. Cleveland had the largest disparity between high-poverty and nonpoor areas at the beginning of the decade but cut the difference in half over the past 10 years. Oakland and Providence are similar in that they have comparatively small gaps between high- and low-poverty areas.

The study suggests that although the correlation between neighborhood conditions and health outcomes declined in the 1990s in a few cases, patterns of association between health indicators and neighborhood contextual variables remain strong overall. Even though gaps seem to have diminished over the past decade, health problems of high-poverty neighborhoods remain substantially more serious than those of nonpoor neighborhoods in all cities.

For the full report, go to the NNIP website at: www.urban.org/nnip/health03.html .

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NNIP Partner Presents on Web Site Usability at National Conference

AUGUST 2003 - The National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership was well represented at the URISA Public Participation in GIS (PPGIS) conference held in Portland on July 20-22. The conference explored how Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology can be used as a tool to empower citizen organizations and revitalize communities. Several of the NNIP partner cities participated, and NNIP was cited as a model in the keynote speech by Larry Orman of the Greeninfo Network, as well as in several breakout sessions. One highlight was a presentation by Denice Warren, Chief Information Systems Designer of the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center (NNIP's New Orleans partner). At a well-attended session on "Implementation Strategies for PPGIS", she presented "Usability Testing of Community Data and Mapping Systems. " The presentation emphasized that a web site must be easy to use in order to successfully communicate an organization's message and content, and that usability testing is the only way to ensure the design is understandable to the target audience. Ms. Warren walked through the steps of usability testing, giving real-life examples from the development process used in the New Orleans site. The presentation suceeded in de-mystifying usability testing for the lay participants, and illustrated clearly that devoting resources to usability testing pays off by making a web site more efficient, effective, and credible.

Ms. Warren and her colleagues have created a resource site at www.gnocdc.org/usability for those who are interested in learning more about usability testing. A background paper summarizes research behind why usability testing is important, especially in web-based GIS, and concludes with a basic protocol for applying usability testing to community data and mapping systems. It also includes links to detailed protocol resources such as scripts, sample user tasks, release forms, and sample analyses of results available for download.

For more theory and research on PPGIS, see URISA's published electronic journal article on "Access and Participatory Approaches" at www.urisa.org/Journal/APANo1/JrnlContents15-APA1.

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Urban Institute Releases Second Neighborhood Change in Urban America Paper

MAY 2003 - Urban Institute researcher Tom Kingsley presented findings from the latest NCUA paper this month at a public forum on the decline of concentrated poverty in the 1990s. For details about the event, co-sponsored by the Brookings Institution and Living Cities, visit the Brookings Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy website at: www.brookings.edu/urban.

Concentrated Poverty: A Change in Course
By G. Thomas Kingsley and Kathryn L.S. Pettit

Abstract:
Research on the increasing concentration of poverty in the 1980s gave renewed prominence to the role of neighborhood conditions in social policy. This paper begins an examination of trends in this phenomenon during the 1990s, covering all U.S. metropolitan areas. It opens with data on patterns of increase and decrease in concentrated poverty, nationally and for different regions and types of metropolitan areas. Data are presented using both a 40 percent and a 30 percent poverty rate cut-off for defining high-poverty census tracts. The paper also examines the mechanics by which these changes took place. The central finding is that, after decades of moving in the other direction, poverty became notably less concentrated in the 1990s. The share of the metropolitan poor who live in high-poverty neighborhoods (poverty rates of 30 percent or more) increased from 25 to 31 percent in the 1980s but dropped back to 26 percent in 2000. The share of all such neighborhoods in large central cities and predominantly black populations declined while shares of those in the suburbs and those with predominantly Hispanic populations increased.
Download PDF

The initial papers in the Neighborhood Change in Urban America research series are products of a Rockefeller Foundation supported project that focuses on analysis of change over the 1990s using census data. For more information about the series, visit the NCUA website.

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Denver Partner Wins Website Award

MAY 2003 - The Piton Foundation website has been awarded a gold medal for excellence in communications by the Council on Foundations, an association of more than 2,000 grantmaking foundations and corporations worldwide. Piton's website (www.piton.org) was selected for the 2003 Wilmer Shields Rich Award in the category of Independent, Family and Operating Foundations with assets less than $5 million. Since 1984, the Council on Foundations and the Communications Network have recognized foundations and corporate giving programs for outstanding communications tools. Award judges evaluated entries based on the following criteria: overall outcomes/impact, message and design effectiveness, organization of content, and outreach/distribution strategies.

For more information about the Wilmer Shields Rich Awards, visit the Council on Foundations website at: www.cof.org/Content/PressRelease/Display.cfm?pressReleaseID=311.

To keep abreast of the latest Piton Foundation news, you can subscribe to its new Neighborhood Facts e-mail bulletin. The bulletin will be distributed periodically throughout the year. It will notify Neighborhood Facts users about new neighborhood data on the Piton website and keep them informed of the activities of the foundation. Piton recently sent out the first edition of the e-mail bulletin and has made it available on its website. To receive future editions, send a blank message to: neighborhoodfacts-piton-on@mail-list.com.

A part of the Piton Foundation website, Neighborhood Facts provides detailed information about Denver's neighborhoods to neighborhood residents, policy makers and others who care about Denver's neighborhoods. It includes data, maps and graphs about each neighborhood's population, housing, economic and education characteristics, and the health and safety of its residents.

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21st NNIP Partner in Hartford

MAY 2003 - We are very happy to announce that the Hartford Community Information Center (HCIC) has accepted our invitation to become the 21st partner in the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership.

HCIC is a collaborative effort of five Hartford organizations: the Hartford Public Library (HPL), its home institution; Connecticut Association for Human Services; Connecticut Policy and Economic Council; Institute for Community Research; and the Citizens Research and Education Network. Directed by Richard Frieder, HCIC is working broadly to expand the use of neighborhood information in community building locally and is one of the core organizations supporting the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Making Connections Initiative in Hartford.

While only recently established, HCIC's constituent organizations have considerable experience in the field. The Hartford Public Library (HPL), for example, has an experienced Information Technology staff and an extensive community outreach program. It developed the Hartford Community Information Database, a database with information on area non-profit organizations and resident groups that won a "Best Practices" award from the Institute of Museums and Library Services. The Library has also implemented a program in which library staff work with community agencies and neighborhood residents to develop neighborhood profiles and improve linkages between communities and the library's resources.

To become an NNIP Partner, an institution must demonstrate that central to its mission is: (1) building and operating an advanced information system with integrated and recurrently updated information on neighborhood conditions in its city; (2) facilitating the direct practical use of data by community and city leaders in community building and local policy making; and (3) giving emphasis to using information to build the capacities of institutions and residents in distressed urban neighborhoods. The candidate must either have already built such a system and be operating it in this manner, or have made demonstrable progress toward doing so.

NNIP will not be accepting additional applications for membership for a while. We need some time to adapt to working at a larger scale after our recent wave of expansion and to raise support for additional growth. We know that other organizations meeting our criteria either exist or are being developed in other cities, and hope to be able to invite more to join us soon. In the meantime, we hope all of you will keep in touch via NNIP News and in other ways. We would love to talk with you more about what you are doing.

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DC Neighborhood College Graduates Inaugural Class

MAY 2003 - The inaugural class of the DC Neighborhood College accepted their certificates on April 23rd, 2003 before an audience of family, friends and city officials including Mayor Anthony Williams, who delivered the keynote address. Representing all Wards of the District, the class of 24 graduates is made up of neighborhood activists, civic association members, advisory neighborhood commissioners, PTA members and non-profit organization members.

Launched in October 2002, the DC Neighborhood College is a public/private venture created and run by DC Agenda that provides civic development training for District neighborhood leaders to be more effective advocates and team members. "The Neighborhood College was created as a strategic response to the gap in community capacity to improve the ability of leaders at the neighborhood and organizational levels," said Carrie Thornhill, DC Agenda vice president - community outreach. "Our goal is to create truly sustainable communities in the District of Columbia."

Upon completion of a six-month program of learning and networking, students receive a certificate and continuing education credits. Instruction is offered by a variety of civic leaders, city officials, non-profit, university and national trainers. The following is a sample of courses and sponsors:

• Getting to Know City Government, Schools, Courts and the Budget - George Washington University Center for Excellence in Municipal Management

• Planning, Zoning, Housing and Economic Development - Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development

• Soul of the City: History & Ethics - Humanities Council

• Strengthening Youth & Families and Asset Building - National Center for Strategic Non-Profit and Community Leadership

• Using Data to Support Neighborhood Revitalization - DC Agenda

An advisory committee including leaders from civic, parent and community based organizations, DC government and schools has assisted in guiding and shaping the development and implementation of the College. The project has been funded through the generous support of contributors including the Prince Charitable Trusts, the Eugene and Agnes Meyer Foundation, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Fannie Mae Foundation, the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation and the United Way Fund of the Community Foundation of the National Capital Area.

For more information, visit the DC Agenda website at www.dcagenda.org. Neighborhood College curriculum - Download PDF

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New Initiative Aims to Strengthen Community Strategies for Returning Prisoners

APRIL 2003 - Six initial partners have been selected by the Urban Institute to be part of an innovative Reentry Mapping Network (RMN) that will help mobilize local leaders to effectively identify and address the challenges that prisoner reentry poses for their communities. The RMN has been launched by the Urban Institute and is supported by a grant from the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Network partners will collect and analyze data related to incarceration, community supervision, and indicators of community well being. Partners will use the data to pinpoint neighborhoods that experience high concentrations of returning prisoners and to examine important characteristics of these neighborhoods that will describe the extent to which such communities are equipped to address the challenges that prisoner reentry creates. Partners will work with community stakeholders to target intervention efforts and resources where they are most needed and to help assess the effectiveness of these efforts. The Network will also document and disseminate the findings and lessons learned.

Although mapping has been used effectively to address a wide range of criminal justice challenges, until now only a few cities have mapped neighborhood-level incarceration and reentry data. Even fewer cities have attempted to link incarceration and reentry data with other indicators of community well being.

The Reentry Mapping Network will follow the successful model of NNIP, which began in 1995 and is funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. NNIP has a consistent track record of using action research to address community goals in housing, health, education, and other areas of community concern. The Network will contribute to this body of work by examining issues related to incarceration and reentry. Five of the six RMN partners are NNIP partners (Des Moines, Milwaukee, Oakland, Providence, and Washington D.C.) with the remaining partner in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In addition, NNIP staff serve as advisors to the Reentry Mapping Network.

Researchers from the Urban Institute's Justice Policy Center and the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center will provide support for the collection and analysis of data, assist the partners in developing local policy responses based on the findings, and disseminate findings pertinent to prisoner reentry in many other cities.

The organizations and their primary research topics are listed below. Click on the link for each organization for more information on its reentry project.

• Des Moines, Iowa: The Child and Family Policy Center will examine family reunification and parental responsibility for ex-prisoners and their immediate families.

• Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Project COMPASS and the Non-Profit Center will identify opportunities to strengthen coordination among the service providers for ex-prisoners and their families.

• Oakland, California: The Urban Strategies Council will help educate and prepare community stakeholders to face the challenges and seize the opportunities that come with reintegrating parolees into the community.

• Providence, Rhode Island: The Providence Plan will examine the effect of ex-offenders' residential mobility on their likelihood of staying out of prison and accessing services, and they will identify strategies for connecting ex-prisoners to community resources.

• Washington, D.C.: DC Agenda will analyze workforce-development opportunities and challenges related to ex-prisoners.

• Winston-Salem, North Carolina: The Center for Community Safety will identify the risks and assets of neighborhoods with high concentrations of ex-prisoners, and they will devise strategies for more effective use of those resources and assets to address the needs of ex-prisoners, their families, and their communities.

For more information about reentry projects at the Urban Institute's Justice Policy Center, visit the Urban Institute website.

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Cleveland Partner Authors Op/Ed Piece on City's Population Trends

From the Center on Urban Poverty and Social Change electronic newsletter:

APRIL 2003 - At the end of last month, the Poverty Center published an op/ed piece in the Cleveland Plain Dealer that outlined the significant challenges posed by Cleveland Mayor Jane Campbell's goal to bring the city's population back above the half-million mark by the 2010 Census. In the piece, authors William J. Sabol and Kristen Mikelbank explain that, while Cleveland's overall population loss began to slow, in-migration and a higher birthrate helped to offset the exodus from the city that still persists, particularly among white residents. The PD piece carried the unfortunate and misleading (not to mention silly) title "Some Clevelanders leave, some die, and too few are having babies." We preferred our simpler, and more accurate title: "Population mark may be hard to hit." Still, we're glad to bring meaningful research to the public discourse about an important issue that was the centerpiece of Mayor Campbell's State of the City speech in February.

In addition to the op/ed article, the authors put forward some of the same points in a related brief, "Behind the Numbers Brief # 3: Migration and Change in Cleveland's Population, 1990-2000," as well as in a working paper, "Migration and change in the racial composition of the City of Cleveland's population between 1990 and 2000." Both papers go into far greater detail about the city's population shifts.

PD op/ed article, Printer-friendly version of the PD article
Behind the Numbers Brief #3
Full working report

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Indianapolis Partner Receives TOP Grant

APRIL 2003 - The Polis Center at IUPUI earned a Technology Opportunities Program (TOP) grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce for its Making Communities SAVI project. The FY 2002 federal award has been matched by local contributions to cover the total cost of the million-dollar project.

In a partnership with Indianapolis Public Schools, the Polis Center will help Westside residents access and use information to overcome problems facing their community. Making Communities SAVI will place the Polis Center's electronic social indicators database in a user-friendly format at the fingertips of 125 6th graders at the George Washington Community School. Through community-based service-learning projects, students will introduce the technology into their neighborhoods by working with their parents and other community residents in problem solving. The school has acquired computers and other equipment that make the project feasible.

Making Communities SAVI builds upon the success of the SAVI Community Connections Project, which was funded by a FY 2001 TOP grant. This first TOP grant allowed Polis to create SAVI Interactive (www.savi.org), a GIS-enabled web application that allows users to access and interact with SAVI data. Both projects build upon the success of the Social Assets and Vulnerabilities Indicators system (SAVI), a comprehensive community information system developed by the Polis Center that includes a data warehouse of social indicators from the nine-county Indianapolis Metropolitan Statistical Area.

Using an adaptive systems approach, Making Communities SAVI will continually collect information on system usage of SAVI Interactive and will adapt itself to support both the typical exploration process of new users and the analytical process of more experienced users. The application will bridge technological learning gaps faced by users who need more intuitive ways to access data.

Project officials and partners say a benefit of the project is that it will narrow an otherwise widening technology gap between poorer communities and affluent neighborhoods. New approaches to community engagement around data and information such as Making Communities SAVI help to ensure that members of struggling neighborhoods are not left behind. The adaptive systems approach enables residents to become more active participants in community development strategies.

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Stats Point to Success for NNIP New Orleans Partner's Outreach Activity

MARCH 2003 - With the long-term goal of mainstreaming data use in the New Orleans nonprofit community, the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center has been tying outreach efforts to timely real-world events of local interest, such as hurricanes, Mardi Gras, Thanksgiving, and, this February's African American History Month.

In celebration of African American History Month, the Data Center teamed up with the Jim Dunn Center for Anti-Racist Community Organizing to illustrate the long and rich tradition of how African Americans have used statistics and scientific evidence for positive social change.

The series looks at successful strategies of the past, explores their present-day application, and offers advice for overcoming obstacles to using data. The first two stories spotlight historical figures Ida B. Wells and Thurgood Marshall. In the third, modern-day activist Jeffrey May from the New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center describes his organization's efforts to combat predatory lending. The final installment is about the democratization of data and how to make the power of data work in local communities. A link to each story was e-mailed in weekly installments to the Data Center's 450 newsletter subscribers and can now be accessed on their web site.

Data Center staff report that publishing these stories proved to be a successful strategy for bringing people to the Data Center web site. Web server statistics indicate an additional 1,000 monthly unique visitors for the month of February, and combined, the articles have been viewed more than 2,000 times to date. The series also appears to have generated some word-of-mouth circulation, resulting in nearly 50 new signups for the electronic newsletter.

Additionally, the series brought double the typical number of monthly return visitors to the Data Center web site. Denice Warren, the Data Center's Information Systems Designer, says, "Seeing so many return visitors is encouraging - we hope that outreach efforts such as this help to integrate using data into the everyday business of New Orleans nonprofits."

African American History Month Series: www.gnocdc.org/articles/democraticdata.html

NEW! Tax Day Article: www.gnocdc.org/articles/taxes.html

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L.A. Partner Finalist for Innovations in American Government Award

MARCH 2003 - University-Community Information Initiatives at UCLA has been chosen for recognition as one of fifteen finalists for the Innovations in American Government Award. Through University-Community Information Initiatives, public university resources spawned an extensive information system that now includes three interactive websites, built and maintained by the Advanced Policy Institute (API) at UCLA. The program's first two sites, Neighborhood Knowledge Los Angeles (NKLA) and Living Independently in Los Angeles (LILA), sparked the nation's first community information system built to serve users throughout an entire state, Neighborhood Knowledge California (NKCA).

Receiving more than 15,000 hits a day, the Neighborhood Knowledge projects and LILA capitalize on the Internet to serve the area's most disconnected residents-the disabled, elderly, and others who live in lower income neighborhoods. In addition to local residents, users of API's online information tools include members of the nonprofit, philanthropic, public and private sectors. Patricia McGinnis, President and CEO of the Council for Excellence in Government, commented, "Both NKLA and LILA demonstrate that a university can pioneer initiatives that help coordinate public and private action to serve the needs of community residents." The latest API product, NKCA, will show the extent to which a neighborhood information system originally developed for a single metropolitan area can be expanded to a regional/statewide platform.

University-Community Information Initiatives was one of nearly 1,000 applicants for the 16th annual Innovations in American Government Award. The award program is based in the Institute for Government Innovation at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and was founded to identify and promote excellence and creativity in the public sector. The award is administered in partnership with the Council for Excellence in Government, a national nonprofit organization that works to improve the performance of government at all levels. Award finalists receive a $10,000 grant and are eligible to win one of five $100,000 grants, announced on May 8, 2003.

For more information about NKLA, LILA, and NKCA, please read our NNIP Partner Spotlight (www.urban.org/nnip/desc_los.html). For more information on the Innovations in American Government program and this year's finalists, please visit www.innovations.harvard.edu or www.excelgov.org.

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Seattle Becomes the 20th Partner in NNIP

FEBRUARY 2003 - We are pleased to announce that another new organization has formally accepted our invitation to become a Partner in the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP): the Epidemiology, Planning and Evaluation Unit (EPE) at Public Health - Seattle & King County. This brings the total number of local Partners in NNIP now to twenty.

To become an NNIP Partner, an institution must demonstrate that central to its mission is: (1) building and operating an advanced information system with integrated and recurrently updated information on neighborhood conditions in its city; (2) facilitating the direct practical use of data by community and city leaders in community building and local policy making; and (3) giving emphasis to using information to build the capacities of institutions and residents in distressed urban neighborhoods. The candidate must either have already built such a system and be operating it in this manner, or have made demonstrable progress toward doing so.

The leaders of EPE - Sandy Ciske, Unit Manager, and David Solet, Assistant Chief - attended the December 2002 NNIP meeting as visitors and are known to many of you through their work in the Local Learning Partnership for the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Making Connections initiative in King County.

They are well regarded more broadly for high quality work on many other projects. A key example is their leadership of a collaboration of data providers to produce the report "Communities Count 2000-Social and Health Indicators Across King County". Find out more about them from their web site: http://www.metrokc.gov/health.

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Providence Partner Issues Neighborhood Report

FEBRUARY 2003 - The Providence Plan, in partnership with Rhode Island KIDS COUNT, recently prepared a report about four Providence neighborhoods called "Residents and Data: Making the Connection." Funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the report was released by the Providence Local Learning Partnership as part of the Making Connections Providence initiative. It provides context around four major focus areas: Family Economic Success, Strong Social Networks, Quality Services and Supports, and Immigrant and Refugee Concerns.

"Residents and Data: Making the Connection" serves as a beginning guide answering the questions: What have residents said? and What does the data tell us? It is intended to inform neighborhood residents, community leaders, service providers, and policy makers about the assets and needs of the Upper and Lower South Providence, Elmwood, and West End neighborhoods. Using Decennial Census and local administrative data, the report compares the neighborhoods to the city and state as a whole in the areas of crime, health, housing, and education. Quantitative measures are accompanied by qualitative information, including resident feedback collected from numerous surveys and focus groups conducted in the neighborhoods over the previous decade.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation sponsors Making Connections, an initiative involving 22 cities. The primary aim of this effort is to stimulate and support a local movement that engages residents, civic groups, political leaders, grassroots activists, public and private sector leaders, and faith-based organizations to help transform struggling neighborhoods into environments that support families.

Making Connections is driven by the premise that children succeed when their families are strong and families thrive when they live in neighborhoods that connect them to economic opportunities, social networks, and quality supportive services. One of more than twenty organizations involved in the Providence Local Learning Partnership, the Providence Plan works to fulfill the Foundation's expectations of participants: indicator development at the neighborhood level, qualitative data collection, and the strategic use of information.

Full report: http://www.provplan.org/download/mcreport.pdf

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Urban Institute Issues First Paper in Neighborhood Change in Urban America Series

Population Growth and Decline in City Neighborhoods
By G. Thomas Kingsley and Kathryn L.S. Pettit

JANUARY 2003 - This paper is the first in the Urban Institute's Neighborhood Change in Urban America series -- research funded by the Rockefeller Foundation using 2000 census data from the Institute's new Neighborhood Change Database (NCDB). It finds that, in terms of population change at least, neighborhoods in the central cities of our 100 largest metropolitan areas generally performed better in the 1990s (gained more, lost less) than in the 1980s, but there were marked variations. Growth was generally more rapid in the sunbelt than the rustbelt, but neighborhoods in metropolitan areas with large Hispanic and Asian populations generally grew rapidly even in the Northeast and Midwest. In almost all areas, city neighborhoods with predominantly black populations and with high poverty rates were most likely to decline, but a nontrivial share of high-poverty neighborhoods did grow significantly. These warrant closer scrutiny using the recently released 2000 census data on social and economic conditions.

http://www.urban.org/nnip/ncua/series.html

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For additional information, e-mail NNIP at nnip@ui.urban.org.