February 2003

If you were a city that had secured funding to open 100 new after-school programs and 11 new Beacon Centers, would you know where to put them so they would most effectively serve kids and families? If you were Philadelphia, you would know exactly where to put them.

With the help of Philadelphia Safe and Sound, the City of Brotherly Love is becoming a city extraordinary for the richness, utility and accessibility of data to guide the development and deployment of resources for kids.

Among the decision-making tools fostered by Safe and Sound are the City Report Card, an exhaustive annual study of children's health and safety indicators; the Children's Budget, which annually measures and analyzes all government spending for children and youth in Philadelphia; the Weapons Related Injury Surveillance System (WRISS), the city's hospital-based tracking system for weapon related injuries and fatalities among youth; and Integrated Data Information Systems (IDIS), which enables city agencies and social workers to share information and coordinate their services.

Another example of the City's determination to be guided by sound data in decision-making is the Geographical Information Systems (GIS). GIS, simply put, is a visual map that shows where the problems and resources are. But the GIS is anything but a simple decision-making tool. It is a comprehensive compilation and analysis of data from federal, state, city and (soon) non-profit sources. It is also a testament to the determination of agencies to overcome turf issues and share data while maintaining the privacy of individuals.

Philadelphia Safe and Sound created the system, gathers the data and shares it with others. "Mapping is an important component of the decision-making process," says Dr. Marsha Zibalese-Crawford of Temple University, a consultant to the campaign who leads the project. "GIS tells us what's really going on in the city, block by block. The purpose is to help city officials provide children and families with the services they really need."

GIS has been used to deploy new services funded through the Children's Investment Strategy, Mayor John Street's effort to secure $150 million to improve the well being of kids through effective youth development activities in the non-school hours and preventive services to strengthen families. About one third of the strategy's funding goal has been achieved, and new programs and services are reaching kids and families. Among the programs and services that have been deployed with the help of GIS are after school programs, Beacon (school-based) Centers, and intensive case management services for high-risk new mothers.

Philadelphia's Youth Violence Reduction Partnership (YVRP) recently expanded its effort based in part on the analysis provided through GIS. YVRP, a multi-agency effort whose goal is the reduction of homicides of youth ages 7 to 24, had great success in the city's 24th and 25th police districts. When deciding which districts to expand into next, officials looked at GIS maps.

"We looked at a lot of info, such as gun shot wound victims, juvenile arrests, the location of existing social services, schools and more," says John Delaney, Jr., deputy district attorney. "Much of the data we look at exists, but GIS makes it more useful. For example, we get gunshot information from the police department. While we know which incidents occur in which neighborhoods, GIS puts the data in one sharply focused picture."

Other data mapped by the GIS are juvenile victims of major crimes, poverty information, CIS after-school programs, school aged population and more. Information can be overlaid, so that a map could show, for example, the location of juvenile arrests compared to the location of schools, or a combination of arrests, pockets of poverty and location of social services.

Delaney says another benefit of GIS is that it addresses the challenge of different pieces of data being reported according to different geographic boundaries. The police and probation departments, for example, report by different districts. "The GIS maps make a geographic overlay possible; differences in geographic boundaries used by agencies to report data become much less significant," he said

Delaney, who is a Fellow with the Urban Health Initiative, believes it is valuable to have Safe and Sound as the broker of information. "Having a neutral third party gather the information helped deal with concerns among agencies about sharing data. Plus, now that the product is in place and people see how it is being used, sharing is even less of a concern."

The data in the GIS is constantly updated, and Safe and Sound is expanding the participating sources. It is working with non-profits, such as providers of after school programs, to have their information supplement the information from government. Safe and Sound is also planning to expand the capabilities of this system to allow access to maps and mapping analysis over the Internet.

The GIS is like the proverbial story of the blind men and the elephant: Many blind men accurately describe the parts of the elephant (ear, trunk) that they are touching, but none give a complete description of the elephant. "We get individual bits of data from a variety of sources, but the GIS is the whole elephant," says Delaney.

For more information on this website on Philadelphia Safe and Sound, click here. For more articles on this website about data-driven processes, click here.