August 2003

When the Family League of Baltimore received a grant in 2002 to reduce truancy, juvenile delinquency and teen substance abuse, it needed to know where to target the money. “We knew there wasn’t enough money for a citywide effort,” says Executive Director Janis Parks. “So we needed information that would help us target the program to the neighborhoods with the greatest need.”

That information was provided by the Baltimore City Data Collaborative (BCDC), an effort begun seven year’s ago whose mission is “provide an accurate and timely analysis of the well-being of Baltimore's children, youth, and families at citywide and neighborhood levels to inform policy and planning decisions and monitor the city's progress in improving outcomes.”

Parks’ example is just one of many that indicate how data analyzed and disseminated by the BCDC inform the decision-making process of funders and policymakers. Parks can readily cite other examples. “When Head Start in Baltimore relied on the BCDC to help it understand where the kids and families in Baltimore are,” she says. “They used the data to locate good spots for additional centers.”

Since 1998, the BCDC has been a part of the Family League, a quasi-public, non-profit organization that focuses attention and resources on improving the well being of children and families by engaging communities and encouraging public and private partnerships.

Baltimore’s Safe and Sound Campaign spearheaded the creation of the BCDC in 1996 with a generous two-year grant from the Charles Crane Family Foundation. “The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation challenged us to improve outcomes for kids,” says Martha Holleman, a senior policy advisor at Safe and Sound. “But improved outcomes compared to what? In general, existing data wasn’t complete and it didn’t include trend and comparison data for all of the conditions we were concerned about. Also, we wanted to be able to compare conditions for kids and families in neighborhoods and with the city and state, which we couldn’t do with the existing data. Plus, the data was not housed in one place, which meant it was very labor-intensive to get even the existing data.”

So the collaborative’s initial function, which remains one of its central ones, was to provide data analysis for the Safe and Sound Campaign -- initially in the selection of its strategies, such as after-school and family support, and now in evaluating and improving their effectiveness. In 1996 Safe and Sound contracted with Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, which initiated the data gathering and analysis and provided for neighborhood mapping of the data. The BCDC later became permanently housed in the Family League, while the Bloomberg School continues to be a major partner.

“We wanted to institutionalize the data function, and to make the data available to all so it could guide the city’s decision-making,” says Holleman. “And the Family League agreed to house the BCDC and make it permanent.” The Family League, Safe and Sound, the Annie E. Casey Foundation and various grants fund the collaborative’s operations.

The primary sources of data used by the BCDC are the Baltimore City Health Department, Baltimore City Public Schools, Baltimore Police Department, the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and many others.

In addition to providing data analysis to Safe and Sound, BCDC, through its website, provides citywide summary data, community specific geo-mapped data and listings of community resources. This information is available in summarized and downloadable formats for use by local, regional and national consumers.

This year BCDC, Safe and Sound, the Family League and the Maryland KIDS COUNT Partnership (headquartered at Advocates for Children and Youth, Inc.) published the first Baltimore City KIDS COUNT Factbook, a reference tool filled with citywide statistics and detailed neighborhood-level information on the children and families living within each of the 55 Baltimore neighborhood statistical areas. The Factbook measures how well or how poorly children are doing by presenting the best available data to monitor the social, economic, educational and physical well being of Baltimore City’s children and families.

According to the Factbook partners, “This publication is intended to be a tool in educating both the public and decision-makers on the status of children in Baltimore City. It builds a strong and effective case for improving measurable outcomes for Baltimore’s children and it is our hope that the increased awareness this publication brings will prompt interest to work toward improving the conditions of and for Baltimore’s children. The purpose of this reference tool is to:

• Educate and raise awareness;
  
• Inform policy and planning decisions;
  
• Focus investment; and
  
• Urge and monitor progress towards improved outcomes for Baltimore’s children, youth and families.”

For more information on this website about Baltimore’s Safe and Sound Campaign, click here. For more articles on this website about using data in the decision-making process, click here. For a download-able copy of the Baltimore KidsCount Databook , click here.