Spring 2001

To evaluate the accomplishments of the Urban Health Initiative, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation contracted with a team of researchers from New York University who have been following the UHI since its inception. These researchers, led by principal investigator Beth Weitzman and project director Diana Silver, follow the five UHI cities and ten comparison cities, which were chosen because they share some demographic and economic characteristics with UHI cities. The team uses a variety of research methods to answer three main questions:

• To what extent, and in what ways, can a foundation-sponsored initiative serve as a catalyst for a cross-sector, collaborative process?
  
  
• To what extent, and in what ways, can a collaborative process result in meaningful changes in policies and programs designed to serve children and youth in urban settings?
  
  
• To what extent do these changes in policies and programs improve the health and safety of children and youth in urban settings?

The evaluation must explore whether the foundation's investment creates something "new" in the five UHI cities that is substantively different from what goes on in other U.S. cities.

The NYU team will provide a complete report after the UHI concludes. However, the team recently reported on the findings of one aspect of the research - key informant interviews with 57 government, business and non-profit leaders in comparison cities. The evaluation team found some notable differences between UHI and comparison cities, differences that point to the set of roles the local UHI campaigns have assumed in each of their cities. These differences include:

• Scope: Unlike UHI efforts, virtually all of the initiatives in the comparison cities focused either on a single health or safety problem. Or, if they focused on more than one problem, the initiatives were based in a single neighborhood rather than citywide or involved reform efforts in a single sector (i.e. government).
  
  
• Leadership: When asked to describe the types of people involved in such initiatives, respondents described people with jobs at lower levels within the participating organizations than those people involved in UHI campaigns, which typically have the involvement of mayors, school superintendents, department heads and the like.
  
  
• Business involvement: Leaders from the comparison cities' business communities were described as being involved only in those efforts targeted at changes in the school system, and generally were involved with a single school rather than in partnership with the entire system. Business leaders are typically involved with UHI campaigns to address non-school issues as well as issues that involve entire school systems.
  
  
• Systems change: Comparison city respondents described far fewer emphases of performance-based approaches as part of the initiatives in which they were involved, than do those in UHI cities, with fewer efforts to change the way public systems are organized.
  
  
• Communications: Unlike UHI efforts, none of the initiatives described by respondents in the comparison cities described communications strategies as a component of their work.
  
  
• In only one city, St. Louis, did respondents describe an initiative that incorporated some of the key tenets of UHI. St Louis's Vision for Children at Risk has taken on some of the roles that the UHI entities have, and has employed some of the same strategies, such as producing an annual "status of the children report".

The evaluation team also found many similarities between the context of the UHI cities and that of the comparison cities. The cities all share a multitude of problems for young people, with numerous initiatives to address them, led by the same types of players: government, philanthropy and the nonprofit sectors. Leaders in the comparison cities, like those in the UHI cities, described the same obstacles to changing systems to address youth issues - the fragmentation of service delivery, the duplication of services, the limited resources, and the poor relationships between urban centers and state governments. In addition, there were a substantial number of people in all the cities who described the myriad of difficulties in gaining access to and using data.