|
Policy Framework
Started in June 2002, the New Communities Program (NCP) is a ten-year, $47 million initiative operated by the Chicago office of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC/Chicago) and funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. NCP develops neighborhood-based plans and promotes partnerships to address local challenges involving employment, education, housing, and safety. Within each NCP community, a lead agency brings together organizations to plan and then to implement varied projects. NCP’s approach to community development is distinguished by its attempt to improve neighborhoods in a way that is comprehensive, coordinated, and strategic.
Agenda, Scope, and Goals
In partnership with LISC/Chicago, the MacArthur Foundation, Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, the Metropolitan Chicago Information Center (MCIC), and others, MDRC is building a body of knowledge about the implementation, achievements, and challenges of the NCP approach to neighborhood revitalization. Towards this end, the research will document:
- The implementation of NCP over time. The research will examine how the NCP model is implemented, what challenges emerge, how they are addressed, and how momentum is sustained. Research will pay particularly close attention to ways that organizational capacity is built and relationships among organizations are established and to the extent these capacities and relationships leverage additional investments in communities. With the recent downturn in economic conditions, the research will also examine how NCP builds and sustain partnerships to “move to scale” and what strategies it employs to respond to local crises.
- NCP’s interaction with public policy. The research will examine areas in which public policies, especially at the local and state level, emerged as important to NCP action in neighborhoods; ways actors attempt to influence policy; and the results of these efforts. In particular, it will examine how initiative-wide priorities become supported by internal and external stakeholders and the extent to which NCP’s policy influence grows over time. This line of inquiry addresses how lower-income neighborhoods attempt local improvement by engaging in efforts to inform public policy and attempt to take advantage of federal and local governments’ new generation of urban initiatives.
- The reach of NCP action and change. This line of inquiry will describe location of projects and investments within NCP neighborhoods, how investments co-locate with other major public and private investments, and how significant investments correspond to levels or changes in neighborhood quality-of-life measures. The goal of this inquiry is to understand how dispersed and/or concentrated NCP projects and investments are within selected neighborhoods and to explore how these spatially targeted investments correlate with neighborhood conditions.
- Patterns of community change. As NCP supports a broad range of interventions to improve neighborhoods, the research will examine varied quality-of-life indicators in the neighborhoods targeted by the initiative. The research will also track how different NCP communities fare in the economic downturn and whether they experience notably different conditions than comparable neighborhoods in Chicago. Beyond monitoring neighborhood conditions, the research will explore neighborhood change dynamics — that is, examine how neighborhood investments and conditions are related to each other and how the relationships among neighborhood quality outcomes are sequenced over time.
For methodological reasons, the study will not permit a formal assessment of the impacts of NCP across Chicago. Nonetheless, the research will explore ways that a variety of social, economic, and policy factors may be working together to support community change and will explore the possibility that concentrated investments in certain places may be in alignment with positive local changes.
Design, Sites, and Data Sources
The neighborhoods targeted by NCP (see map below) vary along a number of dimensions, including community and market conditions, demographics, social and economic circumstances of residents, and organizational capacity.
The study combines both qualitative and quantitative research approaches, looking at the neighborhood quality-of-life plans and their implementation, and projects implemented, as well as changes in community conditions over time.
- MDRC is conducting field research to understand program implementation processes and outcomes. To capture the complexity of implementation strategies in very different communities, the research will use a variety of data sources — individual interviews, structured observations, and archival documents, among others. Research will capture different perspectives on NCP, including those of project staff, program administrators, residents, community partners, funders, and public officials. In-depth cases studies in a small number of NCP communities will be used to develop a finer understanding of the NCP processes, activities, and outcomes.
- MDRC is drawing on a comprehensive database of community indicators to examine neighborhood trajectories and patterns of relationships among indicators of neighborhood quality. This longitudinal, citywide database will make it possible to track neighborhood indicators over a long time and across places. For instance, the data will support an analysis of neighborhood trajectories for both NCP and non-NCP areas.
- MDRC is also assembling data for spatial analyses. For projects funded under the auspices of NCP, the evaluation will examine the spatial patterns of investments, the concentration and co-location of investments with quality–of-life conditions within a few neighborhoods selected for in-depth research. Data will be geocoded and merged with quality-of-life measures and other public data for these neighborhoods of interest.
What's Next
The evaluation is structured in two parts. Phase I, which covered the early implementation period of NCP (2006 to 2008), culminated in the release of an interim evaluation report. Phase II, which extends through March 2013, covers the remainder of the evaluation. Future reports will examine NCP’s adaptation to the changing economic climate and its longer-term role in supporting neighborhood improvements. They will also continue to compare trends in NCP neighborhoods with those in similar neighborhoods not part of this initiative.
|
|
