Spotlight

Making Poverty Indicators Count: The Community Vitality Report Card Project

How does a community know how well it is doing on poverty alleviation? How are data on poverty most useful? How can they make a difference in local communities? In association with the West Coast Poverty Center, the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs is working in eight northwestern states to create an annual Community Vitality Report Card to help counties and cities build the capacity to reduce poverty and create sustainable economic opportunities. The project is funded by the Northwest Area Foundation (NWAF).

This five-year, $1.5 million project will create, disseminate, and evaluate a tool that presents indicators in a visually compelling format and reflects the interrelationships among demographic, economic, social, cultural, and environmental conditions. Through the Report Card, the project hopes to help NWAF change the conversation on poverty with local elected officials and other policy leaders within its territory, which includes Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Iowa.

A compelling yet efficient tool can help public officials assess their performance on meeting the needs of all those who live in their communities. Some state and local officials do acknowledge poverty reduction as a top priority. But the degree to which they use objective information to gauge their progress is unclear. The Report Card will fill this need by conveying quantitative and qualitative "pictures of poverty" in elected officials’ communities, driving home the point that poverty eradication is an essential component of community vitality. Importantly, the tool will emphasize the values on which public leaders must act to build authentic community vitality. Evaluating the usefulness of the Report Card vis-à-vis other data sources and assessing any impact that the Report Card may have on the ways in which the media and policymakers frame poverty’s causes, consequences and solutions are important project components.

Specifically, the Community Vitality Report Card Project will do the following:

• Inform policy makers, non governmental organizations and the media on how well individual counties located in the eight states that comprise the NWAF region are achieving community vitality and economic security for all.
• Focus audiences on the utility of the Report Card to inform equitable economic development by highlighting trends, shortcomings, and successes in poverty alleviation at the county level with linkages among regions, within the nation, and across the globe.
• Support the dissemination of stories on poverty that contextualize the struggle of individuals in the face of systemic problems in need of policy solutions;
• Change the conversation on poverty by providing accurate data to better inform problem definition, policy actions and measurable results.

The annual Report Card will build on existing indicators on NWAF’s Indicators Website to enhance evidence-based decision-making among policy makers, state and local elected officials, policy analysts, and community leaders searching for durable solutions to poverty. The strategic presentation of the Report Card to policymakers and to the media will provide local officials a widely publicized yardstick to measure their effectiveness, helping the NWAF meet its goal of prioritizing policy initiatives for poverty reduction.

Evans School Associate Professor and West Coast Poverty Center Emerging Scholar Rachel Kleit serves as the Project Director and Principal Investigator. Kleit is a leading expert on community development, particularly concerning affordable and mixed-income housing. Evans School Dean and Professor Sandra Archibald (economic sustainability and environmental indicators) and Evans School Professor Andrew Gordon (communications and information technology, evaluation) provide additional project leadership. Project advisors include Assistant Professor Joaquin Herranz (community vitality indicators, workforce development, evaluation), Assistant Professor Laura Evans (tribal and intergovernmental policy coordination), and Professor Robert Plotnick (anti-poverty and welfare policy).