Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Poverty data for each Illinois Political District - just released


A few years ago the Heartland Alliance provided poverty data for community areas of Chicago, which enabled me to create maps showing this information, which I have shared in this pdf presentation.

Today they released a new set of data, showing poverty levels for every Illinois House and Senate district in Illinois. You can see that here

I hope you'll browse map based articles on this blog, and the MappingforJustice blog, that show how this data can be used by community organizers, non profits, youth leaders and others to build and sustain a resource flow needed to fill each poverty district with age-appropriate programs that help youth in the district move from birth to work.


This pdf presentation illustrates how such maps can be used in stories following incidents of violence in different neighborhoods. While my articles model the type of articles many other could be writing, until more people are actually creating and sharing map-stories like this on a regular basis we're not likely to generate the political accountability, as well as the philanthropic and business support, needed to build and sustain long-term solutions in all the places where they are most needed.

Thank you Heartland Alliance for continuing to provide this data.

On a related note, I started participation yesterday in a connected learning course called Collaborative Curiosity, hosted by Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU).  I'll be Tweeting the event using #CuriousCoLab.  It's free. I encourage you to join in. I'll be learning from others new ways to collect, curate and share ideas while also pointing to the work I've been doing for the past 20 years. 

I hope to find some new friends, supporters and even partners.

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