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BNIA at
FIVE
A report to the Baltimore Community from
The Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance
 Better
Information Builds Better Communities
A community that does not know
itself can not improve.
That was a guiding principle that led
to the creation of the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance.
The organization’s beginnings date to 1998, when a range of
nonprofit organizations, city government agencies, neighborhood
groups and foundations came together with the support of the
Association of Baltimore Area Grantmakers and the Annie E. Casey
Foundation. After a two-year planning process, the Baltimore
Neighborhood Indicators Alliance, known as BNIA, was created in 2000
with a specific goal – to help Baltimoreans make informed decisions
about their communities by providing them with accurate, reliable
and accessible data. With that kind of data in hand, communities
could map out strategies for change and improvement.
Today, BNIA remains committed to
providing reliable information to the people, communities and
institutions of Baltimore, as we have been doing for the past five
years. This report gives a review of some of that work, as
BNIA has provided valuable assistance to community groups,
foundations, neighborhood activists and many others as they work to
improve the city.
How BNIA Works
BNIA understands that Baltimore needs a common way of understanding
how the quality of life is changing – in our neighborhoods and
across the city. We all have impressions and first-hand knowledge of
some conditions, but those provide little objective measurement.
BNIA has helped develop ways of obtaining key pieces of data about
Baltimore – everything from crime rates and illegal dumping reports
to data on immunizations and lead paint rates of lead poisoning.
BNIA serves as a gateway to information and data generated by other
entities. We depend on a range of data partners, including the
Baltimore City Data Collaborative, the city of Baltimore, the state
of Maryland, and many others.
To make this valuable information readily accessible to the public,
BNIA in 2002 produced the first Vital Signs report. Built on the
input of dozens of community members and experts, the report
provided 40 outcome indicators that take the pulse of the city. Some
of the indicators measure citywide conditions, but most are broken
down to give specific information on each of 53 distinct city
neighborhoods, known as community statistical areas. With the
publication of Vital Signs, Baltimore residents for the first time
could easily find an array of data about their local communities.
BNIA has continued to track those indicators, with some
modifications, during the past three years and a Vital Signs IV
report was released in the fall of 2005. With four years of data,
the Vital Signs project provides an ongoing and increasingly
powerful tool to measure trends affecting the quality of life
throughout Baltimore. We can more accurately identify where things
are looking up and where we need to do more.
Along with the Vital Signs reports, BNIA and its data partners have
also been able to generate special data sets requested by several
members of the community during the last five years. Such data has
been used to press for better municipal services, apply for grants
or keep a community informed.
BNIA also recognizes its obligations to reach out to the community.
In five years, BNIA has provided technical assistance and training
to dozens of community groups, individuals and organizations. The
training involves more than instruction in navigating a website. We
also stress that community members should adopt a “results-based”
approach to decision making and community change. BNIA has
established one-stop shops for neighborhood data, which allow
community residents to have easy access to the Vital Signs reports
and other data about Baltimore in a user-friendly way. BNIA has set
up access points to in public libraries and community centers to
provide greater access to BNIA’s on-line resources for those who do
not have ready internet access. We are proud of the role we
have played in important community changes, and we will continue to
provide the best possible data to the community in the future.
Helping confront the property “flippers”
In recent years, many Baltimore neighborhoods have been hurt by
predatory lending activities. Through such practices,
unsophisticated buyers pay too much for homes and take on too much
debt. Many eventually lose their homes to foreclosure, some of which
become vacant, visible eyesores. BNIA has worked with community and
legal groups to combat the problem.
Belair-Edison Neighborhoods Inc., a community development group in
northeast Baltimore, has worked hard for years to confront the
problems of vacant housing and high foreclosure rates, and has
turned to BNIA to help quantify housing conditions in the area BNIA
data was particularly useful in determining the extent of the vacant
housing problem in Belair-Edison, as compared to other
neighborhoods. As the foreclosure rate in the city soared a
few years ago, BNIA responded to the community’s needs by developing
a new indicator that tracks foreclosures in each of its statistical
measurement areas. Over time, that indicator is proving to be an
objective measure of progress in Belair-Edison and other
communities. “I think there’s a good overall usefulness [in
the BNIA indicators] as a community development tool,” says Barbara
Aylesworth, executive director of Belair-Edison Neighborhoods Inc.
“A lot of emphasis in the last five years is on work that is
outcome-driven. You want to see that what you’re doing is making a
difference.”
The Community Law Center in Baltimore has also worked with BNIA data
to get a handle on the extent of illegal lending activities in the
city. As the law center’s staff began investigating illegal property
transactions, they used BNIA data to provide objective confirmation
of what they were hearing about and seeing in property records.
“It was an independent review of the data that showed that we have a
crisis here, with a dramatic increase in the foreclosure rate,” says
Diane Cipollone, director of research and policy, Community Law
Center. “Having that confirmatory, unbiased data is helpful.”
Helping Foundations Make Sound Investments
Baltimore-area foundations provide critical support for efforts to
improve neighborhoods and communities in the city. More and more,
these foundations are looking to document the community’s needs and
to measure results, and BNIA is helping to provide that information.
For example, the Marion I. and Henry J. Knott Foundation, a major
philanthropic force in the Baltimore region, has recently embraced
the notion of results-based grant-making. The foundation now asks
applicants working in Baltimore City to use BNIA data, whenever
possible, to quantify the conditions in a particular community.
Many Knott applicants are turning to BNIA’s Vital Signs reports for
the data. Foundation officials ask others to explain why they did
not use the data.
“The Knott Foundation believes in the importance of using quality
data to document changes occurring in Baltimore City,” Gregory
Cantori, executive director of the foundation, wrote in a recent
letter to others in the philanthropic community. “Using terms such
as a ‘poor’ neighborhood or an ‘increase in juvenile crime’ without
data, and especially without a baseline to substantiate such claims,
keeps funders such as ourselves skeptical as to what is actually
happening.” Cantori adds: “We need to measure progress. Without it,
we just kind of go in circles.”
The Annie E. Casey Foundation has also looked to BNIA for
information to guide the foundation’s role in the redevelopment of
an area near The Johns Hopkins Hospital. The project, the East
Baltimore Development Initiative, seeks to remake an 80-acre site to
combine commercial development, new housing and human services for
area residents. The Casey Foundation insists on using reliable
data to drive its projects and that was the case during the early
stages of the East Baltimore project. The foundation used BNIA data
to measure demographics in the area and to assess the challenges and
opportunities for residents. For example, what were the health-care
needs of children and families in the area? Along with its Vital
Signs data, BNIA helped develop a special statistical analysis that
zeroed in on certain affected neighborhoods. The numbers provided
objective measures of the conditions confronting the largely
low-income families in the project area. “A big piece for us was
making sure we knew the status of kids and families in East
Baltimore when the project began,” says Tony Cipollone, vice
president for assessment and advocacy at the Annie E. Casey
Foundation. “BNIA and Vital Signs were one of the biggest resources
we used in that.”
Using data to make progress in Brooklyn-Curtis Bay
Community leaders established the Brooklyn and Curtis Bay Coalition
a few years ago to deal with a variety of concerns – absentee
landlords, zoning violations and problems with trash collection.
Along the way, BNIA has worked closely with the coalition, which is
known as Bay Brook. BNIA staff met with Bay Brook leaders and its
volunteer committees to help them learn about data available to
measure on-the-ground conditions in the community. For instance, the
community was interested in tracking the number of service calls to
the city’s Department of Public Works for problems with trash or
abandoned cars. The calls provided a measure of both the conditions
in the community and the level of citizen involvement. The more
often residents call Baltimore City officials for action, the more
they care about their neighborhood.
Bay Brook has also used BNIA data to make the case for project
grants focused in the area. For small community groups such as Bay
Brook, BNIA provides a valuable resource. “I don’t have a large
staff. So it’s been just fabulous to have some organization like
BNIA keeping tabs on the numbers,” says Carol Eshelman, executive
director, Brooklyn and Curtis Bay Coalition. “It really helps us to
track what’s going on.”
Although the indicators tracked by BNIA have been useful, the
BayBrook organization has taken the
data collection concept one step further. In recent months, the
group developed a customized form for measuring trash collection in
the neighborhood. The organization distributed the forms to various
residents and groups – to document how effective trash pickup is and
to identify property owners that were not adhering to rules about
trash pickups.
Working to Bring New Schools to City
Neighborhoods
The strength of public education has a
direct bearing on the strength of Baltimore City and its
neighborhoods. In many corners of the city, public education is
being transformed by community groups that are launching new charter
schools. In many cases, these organizers turned to BNIA to help
develop their school proposals.
A group in the Patterson Park area
asked BNIA in 2003 for help assembling demographic data about the
neighborhoods surrounding the park. BNIA developed information for
areas both north and south of the park, depicting the racial
breakdown, educational results, income levels and crime rates. The
numbers provided a demographic rationale for a new school in the
area and helped the group win approval from the Baltimore school
system. Later, the group it used BNIA data to help win state
planning funds. In September 2005, the Patterson Park Public Charter
School opened its doors to more than 300 elementary age students.
In northeast Baltimore, the organizers
of City Neighbors Charter School also relied on BNIA data about the
area to win approval for a new school and to apply for grants. City
Neighbors opened its doors in September 2005, with an enrollment of
120 students. Of those students, 45 percent had previously attended
private schools or had been home schooled. “We used the BNIA data to
really get a handle on what we had in our neighborhood,” says
Bernadette Naquin, director of accountability for City Neighbors
Charter School in northeast Baltimore. “We needed good data and BNIA
could supply it.”
Call
to Action
BNIA was created more than five years
ago, thanks to a collaboration of several groups committed to
improving the city through the use of sound statistical data. Buoyed
by support from a variety of foundations and other groups, BNIA has
made important progress by compiling critical data in a
user-friendly form and making it available throughout the community.
The wngsley, the director of the National Neighborhood
Indicators Partnership at The Urban Institute, praises BNIA’s
efforts, particularly its Vital Signs reports, which track
statistical progress over time. “The thing that BNIA does with
neighborhood-level data that no one else has done is to do a
recurrent comprehensive compilation of neighborhood-level
indicators,” he says. “I have gone around saying that Vital Signs
really is the model.”
BNIA’s leaders are proud of the role
the organization has played in the city’s ongoing progress. Schools,
foundations, neighborhood groups and community development
organizations have all benefited from BNIA’s work. Like all cities,
Baltimore needs a mechanism to hold itself, as well as the people
who work, live, play and invest in its neighborhoods, accountable
for its conditions. Helping to provide a framework for that
accountability will be BNIA’s goal in the years to come. Looking
ahead, BNIA will continue to look for new and more effective ways to
develop data and provide it the community.
BNIA’s leaders are also exploring the
best ways to maintain BNIA as a thriving organization, perhaps by
housing it within a larger institution. As we continue to explore
these opportunities, BNIA looks forward to working with the people
who are pushing ahead on so many fronts to make Baltimore a better
place to live, visit and do business.
Questions regarding BNIA and The Jacob France Institute contact
Matthew
Kachura (410) 837-6651. |
