Community Issues Management

I had the good fortune recently, and last summer, to represent Missouri Community Action interests at a convening of really smart people who are building a system to manage community resources in a GIS, spacial analysis environment. We were in Charleston, South Carolina, where the local United Way is funding the development and application of this system called C.I.M. (community issues management). The really exciting thing is that they are working with an organization called the Rural Policy Research Institute (RUPRI) located at the University of Missouri . . . in Columbia! I won't even describe the random string of events that led to working with this group but I am ecstatic that it happened. I brought with me Steve Hollis who coordinates social service funding for the city of Columbia because he sees value in the system too.

RUPRI describes CIM as follows:

The Community Issues Management (CIM) Collaborative provides a mechanism for engaging stakeholders in identifying, analyzing and prioritizing issues that impact their community and region. This collaboration is comprised of an engaged learning community and unique Internet-based decision support tools. These tools include a suite of applications that enable decision makers to conduct place-based analyses and generate maps and dynamic reports.

The CIM system is built within a national-level Internet-based GIS framework that enables intermediaries across the country to add community-specific data and overlay their data with state and national datasets. The collaboration involves integrating health and human services data with other federal, state and local data (i.e., socio-economic, demographic, jurisdictional, political, environmental, and infrastructure data) to: (1) geographically visualize community, regional, and national-level data via the Internet; (2) integrate new spatial data and overlay these data to conduct location-specific analyses; and (3) generate maps, dynamic reports, and “what if” scenarios that utilize the integrated nature of these information systems.

The bottom line for CMCA is that we could enter data into this system about the services we provide, specifically by census tract, neighborhood, or zip+4 code, overlay those services on vital statistics like poverty, crime, childbirth, education levels, household income, etc and look at a map that in a glance would tell us whether we're working in the right places and focusing on the right outcomes. Further, we could add other social service programs and see if there are gaps in our community that need to be addressed. The City or State could add their own criteria and determine if the money they are pouring into social services is having any effect over time. In fact, they could select a range of issues and say "we want to focus our resources on x, y, and z issues" and then specifically track progress on those issues to target their funds and hold service providers accountable, collectively, for that progress. It's kind of a complicated concept that I'm constantly re-wrapping my brain around but it seems like it would be an incredibly helpful tool for an organization that wants to ensure that its services are meeting its goals. You'll hear more about this from me as we look more deeply into the availability of this tool and implications for our service area. In the meantime, you can read the overview here.