PolicyMap News

The PolicyMap team is enjoying having NeighborWorks America in Philadelphia for their national training institute (NTI) and conference this week. Maggie McCullough and Katie Nelson participated in sessions earlier this week and will be talking about PolicyMap as part of a session tomorrow entitled “Using Data and Technology to Drive Strategic Decision Making in Real Estate.”

For the last year, we’ve been working with NeighborWorks’ Success Measures to enable neighborhood organizations to analyze the results of their community surveys geographically. By geocoding survey results, groups can begin to see if households with similar neighborhood opinions are clustered in certain blocks – and if those blocks are somehow different compared to the surrounding area. Pulling from the variety of indicators available in PolicyMap at a block group level, neighborhood organizations can see, for example, which areas have higher concentrations of people under the age of 18, which have aging housing structures, which have higher median incomes and more. Our goal has been to give them a geographic tool for evaluating survey data so they can integrate the results into their decision making process going forward.

One of our latest dataset is religious adherence, which contains rates of adherence by denomination and counts of denominations. We wanted to spotlight the Glenmary Research Center for providing such a great dataset.

Glenmary Home Missioners are a Roman Catholic society of priests and brothers who, along with coworkers, is dedicated to serving the spiritual and material needs of people throughout Appalachia, the South and Southwest. This ministry is concentrated exclusively within the United States and dedicated to bringing the Catholic Church to people who live in the small towns and rural areas of our nation.

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Read more about what The Reinvestment Fund is currently doing.

In this issue: Chase Partners with TRF to Finance Charter Schools TRF Finances New Supermarket-Anchored Retail Plaza Identifying Areas with Need for Supermarkets TRF Celebrates 25 Years and $1 Billion in Community Investment PolicyMap Widgets Take Off TRF CEO in the Spotlight

Chase Partners with TRF to Finance Charter Schools

This spring JPMorgan Chase announced a $325 million initiative to provide financing to high-performing charter schools. As part of this initiative, Chase is partnering with TRF to create a New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) financing pool. This commitment by Chase to the growth of charter schools expands TRF’s ability to finance strong schools, even in today’s challenging credit environment. Loans are available to finance real estate projects for high-performing, established charter schools that are acquiring, renovating or expanding their facilities. Charter schools that are replicating or expanding to additional locations are also eligible for financing. Facility projects must be NMTC eligible. To date, TRF has provided $184 million in financing to 64 schools serving over 30,000 students, with the majority of these students qualifying for free and reduced lunch. Last year, TRF financed a new facility for the Learning Communities Charter School.The NMTC transaction included a leverage loan and equity investment from Chase. With the new NMTC pool, TRF and Chase will be financing more high quality schools like Learning Communities.

Community First Fund is a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI), an SBA guaranteed lender, and have received a high rating by the CDFI Assessment Rating System (CARS®).

Community First Fund has more than 16 years experience in providing loans, business training, and one-on-one counseling to entrepreneurs of all sizes, affordable housing and commercial real estate developers, and community groups in under-served communities in central Pennsylvania. We serve 13 counties with offices in Lancaster, York, Harrisburg, Reading, and Exton.

Check out the PolicyMap widget (here) which depicts all loans financed by Community First Fund since 1992 in their thirteen county region in south central and eastern Pennsylvania. These 855 loans total $36,141,712.86. The widget allows visitors to the website to explore the diversity of loans and the impact they have had across the region. Each loan is represented by a colored circle. By clicking these circles, users can learn more about the individuals the Community First Fund serves.

Learn more about widgets and how you can add a fully interactive map of PolicyMap on your website, click here. We have also created plenty of free widgets for you to add to your website right now! See what free widgets are available here.

PolicyMap loads foreclosure filing data each month for the City of Chicago and thought this article about condominium foreclosures from the Woodstock Institute might be of interest to our users:

CHICAGO—New foreclosure filings on condominiums are a rising share of foreclosure activity in the Chicago region, new data from Woodstock Institute show. New filings on condominiums in the six-county region grew by two percentage points from 17 percent to 19 percent of all foreclosure filings between the first half of 2009 and first half of 2010.

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AME Careers is the online face of the California Department of Education’s (CDE) Arts, Media and Entertainment Career Technical Education Initiative. This effort started in 2004 with the development of the first AME standards and frameworks. The overall goal of this sector project is to expand and support the network of Arts, Media and Entertainment programs in California’s public high schools and colleges in order to connect and enhance the field of practitioners. The development and approval of the standards has engaged teachers, administrators, and the industry.

This initiative has been managed by the Department’s lead AME consultant in partnership with Santa Monica College. Don Doyle, the original CDE staff member, retired in 2008. Jack Mitchell, a 30 year theater and english teacher, took over this responsibility a year later. The principal external consultant for the project since 2004 has been Kathleen Milnes, President and CEO of the Entertainment Economy Institute. PolicyMap has help Santa Monica College and the Entertainment Economy Institute build an interactive map (or widget) to help visualize the data collected for the initiative. Check out the widget here.

Learn more about widgets and how you can add a fully interactive map of PolicyMap on your website, click here. We have also created plenty of free widgets for you to add to your website right now! See what free widgets are available here.

Foreclosure-Response.org is an online guide to foreclosure prevention and neighborhood stabilization developed and maintained by the Center for Housing Policy, KnowledgePlex, the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), and the Urban Institute.

PolicyMap was able to work with Foreclosure-Response.org to build interactive maps (or widgets) to help visualize some of the important data provided on the site. Read more about how the data indicators were selected.

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Congratulations to Christopher Whiteman from the American University Library for winning the PolicyMap iPad drawing at the 2010 ALA Annual Conference in Washington DC.

We would like to thank everyone for stopping by our booth and learning more about PolicyMap. We hope to see everyone at the upcoming American Library Association Mid-Winter Conference in San Diego. PolicyMap is a great resource for students and faculty containing over 15,000 indications of data ranging from demographics, home sales, education, mortgage origination, and much more. Visit our main page www.policymap.com for more information or send us an email at pmap@policymap.com.

Universities or schools interested in our IP-based Library License, please contact at info@policymap.com for a price quote and even a full trial for the entire campus.

Last week, we showed you the map of a new indicator on PolicyMap, and gave hints to help you guess what it was. Here’s the map and hints, to refresh your memory:

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For today’s blog post, we are going to choose one of our new indicators, show you some of its distinctive spatial features, and see if you can figure out what the map is showing. As usual on PolicyMap, darker shades indicate a larger concentration. Here is the map:

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