MANDEL SCHOOL
NEWS AND EVENTS

All members of the community are invited to attend a special webinar on Invest in Children's Positively Moms Initiative (PMI) in Cuyahoga County on Tuesday, May 14 at 3:00pm, entitled "Addressing Maternal Stress and Depression." The webinar will feature Dr. Rob Fischer, Co-Director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, and Dr. Rebekah Dorman, Director of Invest In Children.

Register for this webinar online here and read more information about this and other home visiting webinars.

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With more than 26,000 vacant homes in Cuyahoga County, the Thriving Communities Institute has commissioned a study of the effects of demolition on surrounding property values, and subsequent foreclosure. As one of the study's researchers wrote in "In Saving Neighborhoods, Demolition & Preservation Are Not Mutually Exclusive" posted to CoolCleveland.com on March 20, 2013, the debate has polarized into two camps: one for demolition, the other for preservation.

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Dr. Mark Joseph, Associate Professor at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences and Director of the National Initiative on Mixed-Income Communities, will be one of the panelists at the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Dynamics of Mixed-Income Communities discussion tomorrow, March 20, 2013 from 2:00 to 4:00pm in Washington DC. A webcast of the event will be available.

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"Cuyahoga County vacant homes peak at more than 26,000, despite drop in foreclosure rate"

Cleveland Local ABC news affiliate Newsnet5 and reporter Joe Pagonakis ran a feature on the evening news touring vacant homes in the city of Cleveland. Using Vacancy data from the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development in his report he said, "The latest data released by Case Western Reserve University and Northeast Ohio Community and Neighborhood Data for Organizing, or NEO CANDO , shows Cuyahoga County now peaking at 26,453 vacant homes.

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Dr. Rob Fischer, Co-Director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, collaborated on a pilot study to assess the Primary Practice Physician Program for Chronic Pain (4PCP) and how it impacts both patients and providers. The study is being led by Dr. Thomas C. Chelimsky of the Medical College of Wisconsin which released the study in the press notice "Pain training for primary care providers" via EurekAlert! on March 5, 2013. The results of this study will be published in the Clinical Journal of Pain and are currently available as a Published Ahead-of-Print article.

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While Cleveland's overall population has declined 17% from 2000 to 2010, past research by the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development has demonstrated population gains for certain age demographics in certain regional localities. Mapping Human Capital: Where Northeast Ohio's Young and Middle-Age Adults Are Locating, the second Briefly Stated report released by the Poverty Center in 2013, expands on the initial research by examining the mobility of young and middle-age adults in Northeastern Ohio.

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Despite being an established and well-studied public health problem and extensive interventions to reduce exposure, lead poisoning remains a major environmental health threat to children. Evaluation of the Invest in Children Primary Lead Prevention Project, the first Briefly Stated report released by the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development in 2013, documents the evaluation study of the effectiveness of primary prevention in homes of newborn infants to prevent lead poisoning. The study was lead by Dr. Leila Jackson of Case Western Reserve University's Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics.

Download the report to read more.

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Researchers from the Center on Urban Poverty and Development are sorting and analyzing survey forms from a government requested count of homeless youth in Cleveland as reported by the Plain Dealer in "Youth Count to tally number of young people without stable housing" and "Homeless Youth Count count was worth doing and noticing" on January 23 and 29, 2013 respectively.

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A then soon-to-be-released report from the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development is discussed in the Cleveland Plain Dealer's article "Cleveland's urban scene gets a boost from young adults moving in" on January 21, 2013. The report's author and recent Poverty Center researcher Richey Piiparinen is interviewed.

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The Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences is turning to theater arts and dialogue to help build awareness of the impact of the foreclosure crisis. The foreclosure crisis has been -- and continues to be -- devastating for many families and communities.

The MSASS-hosted production of CLOSURE will take place on Thursday, January 24, 2013, from 4 to 6 p.m. at Ford Auditorium, Allen Memorial Library, located on the campus of Case Western Reserve University. The performance and discussion is partially funded through a grant from the CWRU Martin Luther King (MLK) Celebration Fund.

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For the last two years, the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development has been working as evaluator of a new model of resident services with resident engagement at its core. Center Co-Director Dr. Robert Fischer is lead investigator on this study at the Cascade Village neighborhood in Akron and was quoted in the Akron Beacon Journal article "Knight Foundation grant helping build a community at Cascade Village" on January 14, 2013.

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On November 30, 2012, Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development Co-Directors, Drs. Claudia Coulton and Rob Fischer, gave the the Keynote Address to the 450 attendees at the Cuyahoga County Invest in Children (IIC) Annual Meeting.

Download their presentation A Report to the Community: Invest in Children's Impact to Date in PowerPoint.

On December 10, 2012, the NationalJournal posted a story and slideshow concerning Cleveland's restoration projects of the Slavic Village neighborhood and how they can be an example for the rest of the country. The fifth slide shows Councilman Tony Brancatelli using a map of Slavic Village with over 100 red marks representing homes that are open, vacant, or vandalized. The map was created by the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development by request of the Slavic Village Development Corporation to help understand the housing situation in the neighborhood.

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Nonprofit agencies in Northeast Ohio and elsewhere are embracing new technology to reach out and connect with the public, donors, volunteers, and their own management board. Dr. Rob Fischer, Co-Director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, was interviewed by Crain's Cleveland for "Nonprofits adopting technology to keep up: Tools help groups raise money, communicate" concerning both the need and difficulties. "Everyone knows they should be using more technology to do the kinds of interactions with volunteers, and donors and board members, but it's a tough position for many nonprofits," Fischer said.

Read the full December 3, 2012 article online at Crain's Cleveland with a log-in subscription. The story was also published in the print version of the paper.

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On November 29, 2012, ABC affiliate WEWS NewsChannel5 aired its second Building Better Neighborhoods live special during primetime. A segment during this special was on recent data released by the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development indicating increases in suburban foreclosures in the past year and how this impacts entire communities. Mike Schramm, a research analyst at the Poverty Center, and Frank Ford, the Senior Vice President of Neighborhood Progress, Inc. (a Poverty Center partner), were interviewed for this program.

Watch the special on Youtube. Also read about the program on NewsChannel5 and continue below.

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Though Ohio's economy may be recovering, conditions for the neediest and non-profit agencies that aid the poor have not improved according to the Plain Dealer article "Holiday Spirit, Plain Dealer Charities' annual campaign, reaches out to the struggling local residents even as economy improves" on November 22, 2012. Dr. Robert Fischer, Co-Director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, was interviewed for the story. Dr. Fischer worries that the political climate that arose during the recent presidential campaign is discouraging government funding for social programs. "We saw vilification of the poor in this campaign, talking about victims wanting handouts."

Read the full Plain Dealer article.

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Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development Research Assistant Richey Piiparinen was recently a guest on the WVIZ PBS's Applause on November 8, 2012 to discuss the history and meaning behind the term "Rust Belt Chic" and the culture of Cleveland and other nearby metropolitan areas. Piiparinen's segment is the last in the show, beginning around 18:40 and continuing until 25:50.

Watch online or download the video from Ideastream.

The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development is a research center at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, a graduate school of social work at Case Western Reserve University.

Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development Co-Directors, Drs. Claudia Coulton and Rob Fischer, will be giving the Keynote Address at the Cuyahoga County Invest in Children (IIC) Annual Meeting on November 30, 2012 in Independence, Ohio. Their address will focus on the IIC program's impact to date. Other speakers include: Ed FitzGerald, County Executive and Co-Chair of Invest in Children Partnership Committee; Paul Clark, PNC Regional President and Co-Chair of Invest in Children Partnership Committee; and C. Ellen Connally, President, County Council.

Register today to attend (the deadline is Monday, November 19).

The recently published Rust Belt Chic: A Cleveland Anthology was featured as the top story of Case Western Reserve University's digital newsletter, The Daily, on November 12, 2012. Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development Research Assistant Richey Piiparinen co-edited the book and discussed its development with The Daily. He explained that the idea came from research he had done (at the Poverty Center) that revealed young adults were migrating back into the urban core of the Cleveland area, dispelling some of the assumptions about "urban flight" and showing that the city still had vitality and attraction.

Read the story in The Daily. Also read more about Rust Belt Chic. Piiparinen will be discussing the book and reading selected excerpts on November 13 for the Market Garden Brewery Reading Series.

The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development is a research center at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, a graduate school of social work at Case Western Reserve University.

The recently published Rust Belt Chic: A Cleveland Anthology was reviewed by the Cleveland Plain Dealer on October 20, 2012. "'Rust Belt Chic' warms to scruffy, problematic Cleveland" discusses the origins of the term and the anthology co-edited by Richey Piiparinen, a Research Assistant at the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, and Anne Trubek, an Oberlin College professor. Poverty Center Co-Director Dr. Claudia Coulton also commented on the endeavor to create the book, explaining she was intrigued with how Piiparinen represents "the next generation -- people who are now engaging in the discourse who are not necessarily publishing their ideas in academia, or in the traditional ways."

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Data from the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development's NEO CANDO was cited by Cleveland Ward 13 Councilman Kevin Kelley as why a program was needed to provide free wireless Internet access to residents in the neighborhood of Old Brooklyn as reported in the Fresh Water Cleveland article "Old Brooklyn Connected Blankets 90% of Community with Wi-Fi" on September 20, 2012. Kelley said "We learned through [Case Western Reserve University's] NEO CANDO program that about 50 percent of the ward had a daily Internet subscription."

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28.7% of Cuyahoga County children under the age of 18 are living below the poverty line, according to a story by WCPN 90.3 FM on September 20, 2012. Dr. Claudia Coulton, Co-Director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, was interviewed for this NPR Ideastream story "More than 1 in 4 Cuyahoga County Children Live in Poverty." While this number is the same as the rate reported in 2011, it's up more than five percent from five years ago.

Coulton explained the increase in child poverty began six to eight years ago. "And then we added on to that a recession, which pushed it even further," she said. "So these are very high numbers. And we know that child poverty has a very long-term effect on child development."

Read more and download the .mp3 of the story from WCPN Ideastream.

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A recent post in the Cleveland Heights Observer shows how user driven mapping of targeted neighborhoods available from the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development's NEO CANDO can aid in project planning and public discourse. According to the post, some residents of the Heights oppose a proposed Meadowbrook-Lee tax abated project. This map of the Cedar-Lee area shows recent foreclosures and vacancies.

Maps like this can be generated by users of NEO CANDO using the NST Web Application. This story was also cross-posted on ClevelandHeightsPatch.com.

The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development is a research center at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, a graduate school of social work at Case Western Reserve University.

NEO CANDO 2010+ is now live!

NEO CANDO 2010+ is a major upgrade of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development's NEO CANDO, an interactive online data portal that provides information about demographic, socioeconomic, and other data that help define and promote understanding of the human landscape of Northeast Ohio. This updated version of NEO CANDO incorporates data from the 2010 Census and American Community Survey. It operates faster, provides updated geographies, and enables on-demand mapping using Google maps.

NEO CANDO 2010+ was released by the Northeast Ohio Data Collaborative, a unique partnership between Case Western Reserve University Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, Cleveland State University Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs, and The Center for Community Solutions. Several local governments and foundations have made this possible with their generous financial support including the United Way of Greater Cleveland, The Cleveland Foundation, The George Gund Foundation, Mt. Sinai Health Care Foundation, Sisters of Charity Foundation, Saint Luke's Foundation, Cuyahoga County Board of Health, and the Summit County Health District.

Visit the new NEO CANDO 2010+.

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Echoing then presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, people today are asking "Are we better off now than we were four years ago?" On September 18, 2012, The Sound of Ideas on WCPN Ideastream discussed that question with its listeners and expert guests, including Dr. Claudia Coulton, Co-Director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development.

Download the .mp3 from Ideastream.

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Rob Fischer, Co-Director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, recently gave a presentation at the first Ohio Health Data Statewide Symposium on August 30, 2012. The title of Dr. Fischer's talk during the panel on Prematurity and Perinatal Health was "Social Determinants of Perinatal Health: Obtaining rigorous data to inform policy & practice" which focused on using secondary data on environments that may impact the health of individuals and communities. Fischer cited the value of public data such as that available through the Poverty Center's NEO CANDO. Another useful too is identifiable data, such as data stored in the ChildHood Integrated Longitudinal Data (CHILD) system that the Poverty Center has created using a variety of available data sets.

Read more about the event in the Shaker Heights Patch article "Drowning in Health Data: Symposium Tackles Silos and Promotes Integration" posted on August 30, 2012.

The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development is a research center at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, a graduate school of social work at Case Western Reserve University.

While Ohio's poverty rate remains virtually unchanged from previous years at 15.1%, the median household income has declined by 5.7% since a year earlier, according to the story "Ohio income down, rates of poverty and uninsured unchanged, 2011 census figures show" in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development Co-Director Dr. Claudia Coulton was interviewed for this September 13, 2012 article. She believes the data "suggests that it's the middle class who took a hit this time."

Read the article with Dr. Coulton's comments.

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Rob Fischer, Co-Director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, was recently interviewed for the story "Poverty Rate Mostly Holding Steady Across U.S., Ohio" on WCPN Ideastream. In this NPR story, aired on Wednesday, September 12, 2012, Dr. Fischer discussed how the poverty rate for Ohio, while still high, appears to have leveled off and not gotten any worse than prior years.

Read the article and download the .mp3 of the program.

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On Monday, September 17, 2012, Richey Piiparinen, MA, MUPDD, a research assistant at the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, was a guest on Around Noon, an NPR program on WCPN Ideastream. The installment "Rust Belt Chic & Sterles" featureed Piiparinen and fellow editor Anne Trubek to discuss their recently published work Rust Belt Chic: A Cleveland Anthology.

You can download the .mp3 of the live show from Ideastream.

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Health is not only an issue for an individual; it is one for a community. Rob Fischer from the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences at Case Western Reserve University has teamed up with Kaiser Permanente's Community Health Initiative to evaluate its Healthy Eating, Active Living (HEAL) Program in Cleveland’s Ward 1.

HEAL is a national health initiative, launched by Kaiser Permanente with local community support from Lee-Harvard neighborhood organizations, to make it easier for people to make healthy choices, from exercising to eating, through changes in the community.

The program has been cited by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Institute of Medicine as a model initiative and aligns with First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move!” program to combat childhood obesity.

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A combination of innovative partnerships and the increasing need for individual-level data led to the development of a new data application in the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development's online neighborhood-level data tool, NEO CANDO, specifically targeted to community development practitioners. The Neighborhood Stabilization Team Web Application, or the NST Web App, gives community development practitioners access to individual-level property information at their fingertips.

The fourth Briefly Stated report released by the Poverty Center in 2012 describes the NST Web App, its functionalities, development, and current partnerships. Download the report to read more.

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Earlier this summer, the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development released its third Briefly Stated report of 2012, The Harvest of Ministry: Exploring the Ministry of Women Religious in Cleveland by Poverty Center Co-Director Rob Fischer, Ph.D., and Sr. Mary Ann Murphy, OSU, of Ursuline Sisters of Cleveland. This report discusses the recent studies between the Poverty Center, the Sisters of Charity Foundation of Cleveland, and other religious organizations to describe the unique approach of women religious and to inform others who now or in the future strive to help people in poverty or with other vulnerabilities.

Download this Briefly Stated report.

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Richey Piiparinen, a Research Assistant at the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, participated in the Case Western Reserve University Friday Public Affairs Lunch for a discussion on "Cleveland's Downtown Rebound" on Friday, September 7, 2012. Piiparinen has been called an expert on "Rust Belt Chic" and his Poverty Center report Not Dead Yet: The Infill of Cleveland's Inner Core was featured earlier this year in The Atlantic Cities article "Cleveland's Downtown Rebound."

Read more about Piiparinen's appearance with the discussion group in The Daily article "Learn about 'Cleveland's Downtown Rebound' during Friday's discussion group" posted on September 2, 2012.

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In April 2012, the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development prepared a map of the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Cleveland in the area of Kinsman Road and Union Ave revealing dozens of foreclosed, vacant, and soon to be demolished properties. The housing situation has prompted a call for action for the neighborhood as cited in the Cleveland Plain Dealer article "Cleveland's struggling Mount Pleasant neighborhood eager for rebirth as arts district" on August 25, 2012.

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The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development's NEO CANDO (Northeast Ohio Community and Neighborhood Data for Organizing) is featured in the Fresh Water Cleveland article "Innovative Program Helps Neighborhoods Fight Foreclosure and Blight" on August 23, 2012.

"In the past, information was collected from multiple websites, and by the time it was assembled, it was out of date," explained Poverty Center Research Associate Mike Schramm. "We bring data together across domains. Our mission is to democratize data and to create data-driven decisions by both nonprofits and government."

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A new urban farm will begin in Old Brooklyn as reported in WEWS Newsnet 5's "Groundbreaking on urban agriculture farm in Cleveland's Old Brooklyn neighborhood" on August 22, 2012. Though not stated in the article, data from the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development's NEO CANDO (Northeast Ohio Community and Neighborhood Data for Organizing) was used to determine the vacant lots in this Old Brooklyn neighborhood that would be re-purposed for this urban agriculture project.

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Claudia Coulton conducts research with two goals: to identify issues in urban areas and to solve them. Time and again, her scholarly findings have prompted concrete leadership changes -- which in turn have improved the lives of the people she studies.

For example, when the Center for Urban Poverty and Community Development, which she directs, released a report showing Cleveland's inner-city residents couldn't get to available jobs in the outer-ring suburbs via public transportation, the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority adjusted its routes. And when her research showed the major role disadvantaged neighborhoods play in people's lives -- she founded the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership, a 35-city collaboration that supports neighborhood research in local policymaking and community building.

Coulton will be honored this week when she is named a Distinguished University Professor during fall convocation. The ceremony will be held Wednesday, Aug. 29, at 4:30 p.m. in Severance Hall. Read more in today's Daily.

Related Link: Coulton's reaction to the news

Richey Piiparinen, a Research Assistant at the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, is co-editor for the recently published Rust Belt Chic: A Cleveland Anthology with Oberlin College associate professor Anne Trubek. Oberlin's news story, "Rhetoric & Composition and English Professor Creates Anthology of Cleveland Stories," discusses the book and Piiparinen's knowledge and experience with Rust Belt Chic, citing how his Poverty Center report, Not Dead Yet: The Infill of Cleveland's Inner Core, has reached a wide audience and media outlets.

Download the report in PDF and read the original blog release here.

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As Americans come to grips with the Aurora, Colo., shootings, and now, the tragedy at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, MSASS researchers have been called on to provide their perspectives on what they have learned.

Daniel Flannery, Director of The Dr. Semi J. and Ruth W. Begun Center for Violence Prevention Research and Education, recently served on a panel with community members here in Cleveland. He spoke about the impact of violence on today's society as part of a July 25 discussion on WCPN's Sound of Ideas.

On August 1, the Civic Commons website hosted a similar online discussion during a 3-day forum. Those who participated with community advocates, young people, thought leaders, and organizers encouraged discussion and thoughtful solutions. Patrick J. Kanary, director for the Center for Innovative Practices at MSASS, was called on to contribute.

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When a group of Cornell University students came to Cleveland last spring, they had an opportunity to visit Cleveland and local non-profits in the region. So what did they think of the city and how does it compare to New York?

We collected some random thoughts and reviewed their recent itinerary to provide an interesting perspective. We also created a brief overview of their visit to the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development at MSASS.

Three of the largest employers in Cleveland, Case Western Reserve University, University Hospitals, and the Cleveland Clinic, are being encouraged to focus their environmental goals in and around Greater University Circle to help foster community development in the immediately adjacent neighborhoods, as reported in "In Cleveland, Green Goals Are Transformed Into Community Development" in The Atlantic Cities. The June 29, 2012 article uses a map of the area compiled by the Center on Urban and Community Development to show the economic and housing conditions in the neighborhoods surrounding University Circle to emphasize why improving local conditions is needed.

The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development is a research center at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, a graduate school of social work at Case Western Reserve University.

The Sun News used data obtained through NEO CANDO (Northeast Ohio Community and Neighborhood Data for Organizing) in the article "Home foreclosure rates are declining in the Chagrin Valley, but may rise in Geauga County" on July 2, 2012. In the article, numbers from NEO CANDO are used to show growth and decline in foreclosure filings over the last few years in communities in Geauga County and some eastern suburbs of Cuyohoga County.

NEO CANDO, Northeast Ohio Community and Neighborhood Data for Organizing, is a free and publicly accessible social and economic data system of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, a research center at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, a graduate school of social work at Case Western Reserve University.

Cleveland's recent rise in popularity and resurging downtown have become a huge highlight for grad students looking to make a move. Just ask MSASS student Ramses Clements, who loves living in an apartment here in the heart of it all.

Ramses, 23, is from Chicago, but he is taking advantage of living in a newly revived downtown where world-renowned restaurants, outdoor pubs and cultural venues are lined along city blocks.

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Michael Schramm, MA, a research associate and analyst/programmer at the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development will be presenting during the conference "Remaking America for the 21st Century: Reclaiming Vacant Properties" in New Orleans, LA on June 20, 2012. The three day conference is sponsored by the Center for Community Progress.

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David C Barnett's story, "A Comeback For Downtown Cleveland" on NPR's Morning Edition includes comments from the Center's Richey Piiparinen, related to his research report and articles about twenty-somethings' reverse migration to Cleveland.

A summary of Richey's report and the various locations it has been featured can be viewed here.

Dr. Cyleste Collins, a research assistant professor at the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development and the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, recently presented during the "Healthy Neighborhoods" Prevention Research Center Seminar Series. Collins's talk on April 22, 2012 was titled "Losing Hold of the American Dream: Connections Between Foreclosures and Health."

Download the PowerPoint presentation and watch the talk or see the video embedded below.

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Robert L. Fischer, Research Associate Professor at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, co-directs the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development. His Op Ed on the Plain Dealer website "Catholic sisters' work is driven by faith, love and humility -- not politics," calls attention to the core work of Catholic Sisters, based on his ongoing research on the ministries of women religious in Cleveland.

It was supposed to be a meeting that began at 11 a.m., and one that Claudia Coulton would probably have to miss.

So when word got out that the Lillian F. Harris Professor of Urban Social Research at MSASS might be a no-show, someone needed to somehow convince her to go up to the third floor of the Mandel School – pronto.

When she arrived to see her MSASS peers and faculty all seated in a third-floor classroom, she had no idea what would happen next: Coulton was being named a 2012 Distinguished University Professor by Case Western Reserve University President Barbara Snyder.

"I would have never expected this could happen," Coulton said. "I'm grateful for everyone at MSASS, and the university for making this selection. My work would not have been possible without all of the support I have received from MSASS and from CWRU over the years."

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Dr Robert Fischer, Co-Director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, has been appointed to the board of the Cleveland Heights-University Heights Library consortium by the Heights school board. "I want to ensure that the library maintains its reputation for high quality service and extensive holdings," Fischer stated in his application. "As libraries move to greater emphasis on electronic and alternative media, I want to ensure that the Library continues to have a key role as a physical location and civic space."

Read the announcement in the Cleveland Heights Patch article "Cleveland Heights Resident Joins Library Board" on May 10 and in the Cleveland Plain Dealer "Robert L. Fischer appointed to Cleveland Heights-University Heights Public Library Board of Trustees" on May 13, 2012.

Rob Fischer, Ph.D. is the Co-Director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, a research center at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, a graduate school of social work at Case Western Reserve University.

The recent Center On Urban Poverty and Community Development report by research assistant Richey Piiparinen was featured in The Atlantic Cities article "Cleveland's Downtown Rebound" on May 4, 2012 as evidence that America may be in the "early stages of a back-to-the-city movement."

Read more about Piiparinen's "Not Dead Yet: The Infill of Cleveland's Urban Core" in the Urban Institute's Metrotrends, the Poverty Center's Briefly Stated report, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer article.

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Taryn Gress, a 2011 graduate from the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, recently posted a blog titled "Invest in evaluation and children!" about Rob Fischer, Co-Director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, NEO CANDO, Invest In Children, and the need for program evaluation. Ms. Gress is a former student of Dr. Fischer and blogged after attending a presentation by Fischer and Bob Staib of Invest In Children at the Cuyahoga County Social Welfare Conference on March 23, 2012.

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Literacy rates in Cuyahoga County, compiled by the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, are featured in the Plain Dealer editorial "Awful literacy stats make the case for Jackson's school reform plan" by Brent Larkin on March 31, 2012.

Data from the Center indicate that 43.8% of residents in Cuyahoga aged 16 and older score below the national literacy standards level for functioning successfully. The problem is worse in Cleveland and East Cleveland with 65% and 78.9% respectively.

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Dr. Cyleste Collins, a research assistant professor at the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development and the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, was interviewed for The Dayton Daily News article "Foreclosure damages children's health, grades" on April 29, 2012. Dr. Collins discussed difficulties families face when going through the lengthy foreclosure process.

"Many of these families are living in a state of limbo for a very long period of time. Being in that limbo state and trying to fight to avoid losing your house is very tough on these families."

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Downtown Cleveland and the surrounding neighborhoods are growing faster than the outer ring of the City and the rest of Cuyahoga County for the first time in recent history, as reported in the Cleveland Plain Dealer article "Cleveland's inner city is growing faster than its suburbs as young adults flock downtown" on April 27, 2012. This growth is largely attributed to young professionals moving into the core of the Cleveland area.

Poverty Center research assistant Richey Piiparinen was interviewed for the recently published study "Not Dead Yet: The Infill of Cleveland's Urban Core" in the Urban Institute's Metrotrends and the Poverty Center's Briefly Stated report.

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The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development has released a report entitled Not Dead Yet: The Infill of Cleveland's Urban Core which discusses the increase of residents in Downtown Cleveland and the surrounding neighborhoods.

This report was originally released through the Urban Institute's Metrotrends found here and blogged here.

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Politfact Ohio fact-checked Ohio Rep. Marcy Kaptur's statement that the poorest in America are women, and called on Professor Claudia Coulton to give expert advice on the data behind the Congresswoman's statement. Professor Coulton's research as Co-Director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, lends strong suport to the statement, as well as the US census data provided in the Politifact article.

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Most of us have seen the shrinking population figures for Cleveland and other urban cities across America, but an MSASS researcher has uncovered a glimmer of hope that's not been reported until now.

Downtown Cleveland has grown substantially over the last two decades, according to Richey Piiparinen, research assistant with the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development. His latest research indicates that the neighborhood's population grew 96 percent, with residential totals increasing from 4,651 to 9,098.

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A Cleveland Jewish News Op-Ed: Harvesting Donations to Stem Hunger, cites the new Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development report, The Changing Face of Poverty in Northeast Ohio, in noting the increase of poverty locally and the increased use of the Cleveland Food Bank, referring people to the Harvest for Hunger campaign where donations can be made to meet this need.

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The Poverty Center's Neighborhood Stabilization Team Application (NST APP) has been selected as a Leadership in Community Innovation Award finalist. You are invited to the judging and presentation event on March 6th from 4:00-6:00 p.m. at Cleveland State University’s College of Urban Affairs.

A panel of three judges will decide who wins $25,000, funded by Key Bank, at the event. Register online to attend.

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Research from NEO CANDO and the Mandel School's Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development has become a critical part of a local effort to address the housing crisis in Cleveland. On February 13, TV reporter Joe Pagonakis provided a behind-the-scenes look at recent foreclosure figures in northeast Ohio.

Read the NewsChannel5 report.

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The Plain Dealer refers to and analyses data regarding "The Changing Face of Poverty," a Briefly Stated report by the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, at Case Western Reserve University.

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The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development at Case Western Reserve University released a report entitled The Changing Face of Poverty in Northeast Ohio which details the increase in poverty across the region.

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"The depth of this recession has pushed people over the edge," said Dr Claudia Coulton, Co-Director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development in "The new poor: Situational poverty on the rise locally" in The News-Messenger of Fremont, Ohio.

The story cites that according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 2010 saw the highest number of people living in poverty since the first reports were published over half a century ago and that 12.2 percent of residents of Sandusky County (where Fremont is the county seat) live at or below the poverty level. Suburbs and more rural areas are showing the fastest rise in poverty, according to the Brookings Institution, and many of these people have little experience in dealing with the situation.

Read the December 3, 2011 article and continue below.

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A study by the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development based on 2008 data concluded that children who had been enrolled in pre-kindergarten programs sponsored by Cuyahoga County scored better in kindergarten readiness than children who attended other programs or did not attend preschool. This study is mentioned in a November 27, 2011 article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Read "Cuyahoga County invests in preschool, while Cleveland schools cut programs" and continue below.

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The debate about childhood obesity continues to rage on, and here in Cuyahoga County, it's making social workers stand up and take notice.

Associate Professor David Crampton recently appeared on WCPN-90.3 to talk with local officials after Cuyahoga County social workers placed an 8-year-old boy in foster care. The 200-pound third grader was removed from his home because many believed the boy’s mother was neglecting his health needs. Crampton was interviewed by Sound of Ideas host Mike McIntyre, who provided details of the case, along with special guest Sumana Narasinham, MD, director of Healthy Kids/Healthy Weight program, University Hospitals; Shakyra Diaz, policy director, Ohio ACLU; and Patricia Rideout, chief administrator, Cuyahoga County Department of Children & Family Services.

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Michael Schramm, MA, a research associate and analyst/programmer at the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development will be presenting at the Strategic Data-Use to Stabilize Neighborhoods conference in Baltimore, Maryland on December 6, 2011. The conference is presented by the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.

Schramm, who is also the Director of Information Technology and Research at the Cuyahoga County Land Reutilization Corporation (often known as the Land Bank) will be presenting Using Data to Drive Neighborhood Investment along with: Ira Goldstein, Managing Director for Policy, The Reinvestment Fund, Philadelphia; Karla Henderson, Group Executive of Planning and Facilities, Detroit Mayor's Office; Danielle Lewinski, Director of Planning and Technical Programs, Community Legal Resources, Detroit; and Frank Ford, Senior Vice President, Research and Development, Neighborhood Progress, Inc., Cleveland. They will discuss and give their perspectives on how Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia address new and promising ways of disinvestment by using data, mapping, and community engagement.

Graphing data from NEO CANDO, WCPN Ideastream reports that "after a brief respite, the number of foreclosures in Ohio are rising again" according to the Mortgage Bankers' Association.

NEO CANDO, the Northeast Ohio Community and Neighborhood Data for Organizing, is a social indicators data warehouse and research platform run by the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development. The graph generated using NEO CANDO data shows the third quarter of 2011 saw nearly 400 more foreclosure filings in Cuyahoga County than the second quarter.

Read the November 21, 2011 report by Cleveland area NPR affiliate 90.3 WCPN and download the .mp3 of the broadcast.

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CBC News journalist Paul Hunter recently visited Cleveland to investigate how the city is combating the ongoing foreclosure crisis. Hunter met with Gus Frangos, president of the Cuyahoga County Land Reutilization Corporation (often known as the Land Bank), who illustrated the severity of the situation with a map showing the more than 15,000 properties in Cleveland suffering foreclosure, generated with data from the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development's NEO CANDO (Northeast Ohio Community and Neighborhood Data for Organizing).

Watch the video "On the Road Ahead: Cleveland" from November 14, 2011 at CBC News The National or below.

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NEO CANDO is one of the tools being utilized by residents of the City of South Euclid to fight the blight of vacant and foreclosed houses as mentioned in "South Euclid left with responsibility of dealing with vacant homes: Your Turn" in the Sun Messenger. NEO CANDO, the Northeast Ohio Community and Neighborhood Data for Organizing system, is developed by Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development.

South Euclid is using NEO CANDO to track and map trends in foreclosure as one of its many tools to combat the crisis. Other methods the city is employing include fostering strategic partnerships, working with Empowering and Strengthening Ohio's People (ESOP), and utilizing the Cuyahoga Land Bank.

Read the November 4, 2011 editorial in the Sun Messenger.

The Brookings Institution reports that Northeast Ohio has shown some of the fastest growth in the nation for the number of people living in extremely poor neighborhoods, a situation that Dr Claudia Coulton, co-director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, confirmed in a November 3, 2011 article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Brookings' "The Re-Emergence of Concentrated Poverty: Metropolitan Trends in the 2000s" looked at the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the country where at least 40 percent of residents were at or below the poverty level including 24,000 residents in "high-density" suburbs such as Cleveland Heights, Elyria, Euclid, Kent, Lorain, and Painesville.

"Yes, this is exactly what we've seen," said Dr. Coulton about the report. "It [poverty] has hit the suburbs hard."

Read more in "Brookings report finds poverty-stricken neighborhoods jump dramatically in Cleveland area" in the Plain Dealer and below.

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Richey Piiparinen, MA, MUPDD, research assistant at the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development was invited to be one of the guest bloggers at the Living Cities Integration Initiatives 20th Anniversary event on September 27, 2011 at the Newseum in Washington, DC. Piiparinen contributed two entries during the event: "Urban Decline: Can it be as simple as a lack of communication?" and "The Future of Blue Collar Philanthropy". The eight guest writers from around the country were asked to blog their experiences and perspectives as public, private, and philanthropic sector leaders spoke about collaboration, innovation, and urban social change over the past two decades.

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Dr Rob Fischer, Co-Director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, was contacted for the Huffington Post article "The New Face Of American Poverty Is Often A Child's". Fisher explained in the story that "as families cycle in and out of poverty, faith-based service programs tend to catch people who fall through the cracks of other safety nets."

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The recently released Spotlight on the Housing Market in Cleveland-Elyria-Mentor by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the U.S. Department of the Treasury highlights the Cuyahoga County Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) and its use of the "sophisticated mapping system" that is NEO CANDO (Northeast Ohio Community and Neighborhood Data for Organizing) by the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development.

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Dr Cyleste Collins, a research assistant professor at the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, is presenting at Foreclosures and the Family: The Impact and What Works by Community Housing Solutions. This Family Stability Initiative Conference is being held on Thursday, October 27 from 8:30am to 12:30pm at the Dolan Center for Science and Technology of John Carroll University in University Heights, Ohio.

Dr. Collins's topic is "The Impact of Foreclosure on the Family". She is joined by co-presenters David Rothstein of Policy Matters Ohio and John Ropar, director of the John Carroll University Counseling Center.

The Washington Post featured the Cleveland foreclosure and vacant properties crisis with "Banks turn to demolition of foreclosed properties to ease housing-market pressures" including the slideshow "Cleveland could hold the future of the foreclosure crisis: Demolition". Slide 9 features a map of foreclosed properties in Cleveland that was created using data from the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development's NEO CANDO (Northeast Ohio Community and Neighborhood Data for Organizing) by the the Cuyahoga County Land Reutilization Corp (often known as the Land Bank).

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Richey Piiparinen, MA, MUPDD, research assistant at the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development was recently featured in the Friday Five Questions segment of The Daily, the digital newspaper of Case Western Reserve University, on September 23, 2011. In addition to his work at the Center, Piiparinen writes for Rust Wire, a regional blog dedicated to growth in the Rust Belt, and helped start the urban art therapy and architectural reworking W. 83rd Street Project.

Learn about Rihey's preferred music and books, his favorite things about CWRU and Cleveland, and more.

The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development is updating its map series for the density of individual food stamp recipients in the City of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County from July 2000 through July 2009. Maps for 2010 and 2011 will be produced in the near future. Among its many functions, NEO CANDO (Northeast Ohio Community and Neighborhood Data for Organizing) allows users to extract data across geography and time to examine trends such as food stamp enrollment.

Neighborhoods in Cleveland continue to have the greatest percentages of individuals receiving Food Stamps. The greatest increases in the number of food stamp recipients, however, are found in Cuyahoga's suburbs.

Download maps for years 2000-2009 as a single PDF (full screen view). You can also watch a video slideshow of years 2001-2008.

Michael Schramm, MA, a research associate and analyst/programmer at the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, presented at the Data Driven '11 conference of Community Research Partners on September 23, 2011 in Columbus, Ohio. Mr. Schramm presented "NEO CANDO: a Data-Driven Response to Foreclosure in Cleveland and Cuyahoga County" (PowerPoint).

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According to a Saturday, September 24 article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, 2011 marks the first year in which all 41 counties in Ohio that are reappraising or updating property values saw decline. Dr. Claudia Coulton, Co-Director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development comments that "it hasn't turned around. The economy is still bad and people are still worried about their jobs and people are having difficulty getting loans to buy homes. We still have a stalled housing market."

All though Cuyahoga County will not conclude it's reappriasal until 2012, several other counties in NEO CANDO's area re included: Geauga, Ashtabula, and Summit.

Read "Property values fall across Ohio as every county undergoing reappraisal sees drop" and more below.

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Richey Piiparinen, MA, MUPDD, research assistant at the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, contributed "The Real World Cleveland (or Detroit, Buffalo, etc)" to Rust Wire, a regional blog dedicated to growth in the Rust Belt, on September 16, 2011. The story features data from the Center and from NEO CANDO (Northeast Ohio Community and Neighborhood Data for Organizing) including four video slideshows of maps on high poverty, food stamp recipients, sheriff's deeds, and concentrated affluence.

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Dr Claudia Coulton, Co-Director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, will be one of the featured speakers at the Building Solutions to Poverty: Methods and Metrics for Identifying Success conference held over October 19-21, 2011. Dr Coulton's presentation is titled "Innovative Solutions to Poverty: Issues and Challenges in Poverty Measurement, Intervention, Design, and Evaluation". The conference is organized by the International Poverty Solutions Collaborative (IPSC) at the Ohio State University. The keynote speaker is Sheldon Danziger, Ph.D., director of the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan.

Read more about the conference and the speakers and watch the video below.

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Poverty affects all residents of the City of Cleveland and surrounding areas. Some highlight and comment on the issues with art, including new media. Below is a video slideshow on YouTube depicting photographs, graphs, and illustrations of Cleveland (and some that are elsewhere), collected as a collage. The video includes several graphs and maps from the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development at:

2:10 - a food stamps data tracking page the Center supplied for the Cleveland Foundation
2:38 - a food stamp map using NEO CANDO data
3:41 - a subprime lending map
4:10 - a residential vacancy map

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Dr Rob Fischer, Co-Director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development and Research Associate Professor of the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences is presenting a free webinar on "Assessing Outcomes and Evaluation Programs in Nonprofits" on Wednesday, September 14, 2011 from 4:00 to 5:00pm for the Mandel Center for Nonprofit Organizations.

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Cuyahoga County's Invest in Children (IIC) has released their Making A Big Impact: The 2010 Annual Report of Invest in Children in electronic format. Collaborative work by the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, which has partnered with IIC on various studies for over a decade, is included in the report.

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The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development is one of the featured research and training centers in the recently released 2010-2011 Research & Training Annual Report of the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences. The report discusses the issues surrounding Cleveland as well as the various projects of the Center and the uses for NEO CANDO (Northeast Ohio Community and Neighborhood Data for Organizing).

Read the entire report as either a:
2.06 MB, 72dpi .PDF for slower connections and email, or
20.1 MB, 300dpi .PDF for faster connections and printing.

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Earlier this year, the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development in partnership with the Saint Luke's Foundation released a series of 12 data briefs on key social demographic and population dimensions of three neighborhoods on the east side of the City of Cleveland: Buckeye-Shaker, Mount Pleasant, and Woodland Hills. The data briefs address issues related to Saint Luke's target communities, with specific attention to changes in indicators over time. Using data from a range of Census and local sources, the briefs highlight important dimensions of life in these three neighborhoods that can inform approaches to address community needs.

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Dr Anna Maria Santiago, faculty associate of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development and Leona Bevis/Marguerite Haynam Professor of Community Development at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences is the lead author on several recent and upcoming publications on low-income homeownership.

Foreclosing on the American dream? The financial consequences of low-income homeownership, Housing Policy Debate Volume 20, Issue 4, 2010

"Be It Ever So Humble, There's No Place Like Home: the experiences of low-income, minority homebuyers" in the soon to be published Fair and Affordable Housing in the U.S.: Trends, Outcomes, Future Directions (forthcoming September 2011)

Low-Income Homeownership: does it necessarily mean sacrificing neighborhood quality to buy a home?, Journal of Urban Affairs Volume 32, Issue 2, pages 171–198, May 2010

Read a brief section from each abstract or introduction.

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Dr Rob Fischer, Co-Director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development and Research Associate Professor of the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, received the Roberta O'Keefe Recognition Award for outstanding service to Ohio Program Evaluators' Group (OPEG) in May 2011. A long time board member, Dr. Fischer served as President to the OPEG board from 2005 to 2011.

Read the award announcements from OPEG.

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The development of a Neighborhood Stabilization Team (NST) by the Cuyahoga County Land Reutilization Corp (often known as the Land Bank) is showcasing some of the good work happening in local communities. NST includes Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development staff members Michael Schramm and April Hirsh and NST primarily uses data from NEO CANDO (Northeast Ohio Community and Neighborhood Data for Organizing). A Sunday, August 27, 2011 editorial published by the Cleveland Plain Dealer tells part of the Land Bank and NST's story.

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According to data available from NEO CANDO (Northeast Ohio Community and Neighborhood Data for Organizing), the number of new mortgage foreclosures in Cuyahoga County during the month of August 2011 will top 1000, as discussed by Bill Callahan in his Callaghan Cleveland Diary weblog post on August 27, 2011.

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In the fall of 2010, Dr. Robert Fischer, Co-Director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development and Research Associate Professor at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences and students from his course MAND 410: Quantitative Analysis for Nonprofit Leaders at the Mandel Center for Nonprofit Organizations conducted a survey project for the Cleveland chapter of the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network. Their work is cited in the recently released report:

Building a Career in Nonprofit Cleveland: Focus on the Nonprofit Identity (full report and executive summary)

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Dr. Robert Fischer, Research Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development is featured in a video presentation on program evaluation titled "Showing That Your Work Matters" on Grant Space, a service of the Foundation Center, Cleveland.

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Bank of America Corp., the biggest mortgage servicer in the country, will soon donate 100 foreclosed houses to the City of Cleveland so these vacant properties can be demolished as discussed in an online Bloomberg article on July 27, 2011. BoF and other servicers have similar plans for other cities.

It's estimated upwards of 13,000 residences in Cleveland are foreclosed or abandoned, using information provided by Case Western Reserve University's Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development and Neighborhood Progress Inc.

Read the full Bloomberg article or the repost in the Financial Post.

Neighborhood Progress Incorporated (NPI), a partner of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, has appointed Center Co-Director, Dr. Claudia Coulton, to its Board of Trustees.

Read the full announcement here.

For more on collaborations between NPI and the Poverty, watch the Federal Reserve Board neighborhood stabilization video report on Cleveland data-driven decision-making.

Freshwater Cleveland recently covered a project headed by Richey Piiparinen, a research assistant who recently joined the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development.

The project focuses on the psychological effects of abandoned properties in Cleveland's neighborhoods. In partnership with the City of Cleveland and Detroit Shoreway CDO, Richey is a part of a team that is implementing an urban art therapy project on W. 83rd St., which is the site of devastating vacant house explosion that rocked the community. The project entails turning one of the vacant houses condemned due to the explosion into an interactive art exhibit that will open with a reception July 28th. The house/exhibit will be deconstructed, with salvageable materials relocated to a reading garden that will be built down the street.

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The City of Toronto, Canada has launched a neighborhood data website similar to NEO CANDO (Northeast Ohio Community and Neighborhood Data for Organizing). Dr. Claudia Coulton, co-director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, discuses in the article the uses for NEO CANDO here in Cleveland including researching vulnerable populations, predatory lending, and improving preschool and how this public data can benefit any community.

Read the entire June 30 article in the Toronto Star.

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Dr. Rob Fischer, Co-Director of the Center on Urban Poverty & Community Development at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences has been invited to be an adviser on The Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University's prestigious Advancing Knowledge Advisory Council Scholar Community, that awards grants, and mentors non-profit leadership.

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In the fall of 2009, a group of 18 philanthropic funders in Cleveland, Ohio, launched a yearlong pilot designed to engage health and human service nonprofits in a process focused on significant inter‐organizational restructuring. The funders saw the context of economic crisis as a threat to the "collective ability to provide more and better human services despite rapidly diminishing resources," as well as an "unprecedented opportunity for the nonprofit community and its leaders to demonstrate extraordinary vision and ingenuity." These funders pooled their financial and human resources to develop a pilot project focused singularly on a group of nonprofit human services organizations in Cuyahoga County, Ohio.

The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development submitted a report on the pilot program to the Funders Collaborative.

Read the "Restructuring the Nonprofit Human Services Sector: Findings from an Innovative Pilot" report here.

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The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development has released social and economic updates for NEO CANDO (Northeast Ohio Community and Neighborhood Data for Organizing).

In the second part of this update from April 2011 are:

• 2009-2010 Cleveland Municipal School District (CMSD) Enrollment, Attendance and Proficiency Test Data


• 2006-2008 Birth Data

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The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development has released social and economic updates for NEO CANDO (Northeast Ohio Community and Neighborhood Data for Organizing).

In the first part of this update from April 2011 are:

• 2010 Census Redistricting Data


• 2009 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) Data

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The Federal Reserve, through its Community Development staff located at its 12 regional reserve banks and the Board of Governors in Washington, D.C., works to bring together key community stakeholders to identify local problems and explore solutions, some of which are highlighted in a series of three concise video documentaries.

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The PNC Foundation and the George Gund Foundation have donated a combined total of $1.3 million for Cuyahoga County's Universal Pre-Kindergarten (UPK) program. The program was created by Invest in Children (IIC). The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development conducted an evaluation of the pilot program, showing the positive impact on children.

Read the full WKYC Channel 3 article here on the announcement.

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"Finding Place in Community Change Initiatives: Using GIS to Uncover Resident Perceptions of their Neighborhoods," by Claudia Coulton, and Tsui Chan of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, and Kristen Mikelbank of the Cleveland Food Bank, has been published by the Journal of Community Practice, released March 4, 2011.

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The journal article, "Do employment and type of exit influence child maltreatment among families leaving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families?" by David Beimers, and Claudia J. Coulton is in-press at "Children and Youth Services Review," and available online as of February 9, 2011.

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On March 10, the US Census Bureau released, "Ohio's 2010 Census Population Totals, Including First Look at Race and Hispanic Origin Data for Legislative Redistricting."

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An article from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland titled, ""Slowing Speculation: A Proposal to Lessen Undesirable Housing Transactions" includes suggested readings from two reports published by the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development: "Pathways to Foreclosure: A Longitudinal Study of Mortgage Loans, Cleveland and Cuyahoga County, 2005-2008" and "Beyond REO: Property Transfers at Extremely Distressed Prices in Cuyahoga County, 2005-2008".

The Center has worked closely with the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland and with the Cuyahoga Land Bank, also discussed in the article, and provides information to nonprofits and government programs for neighborhood stabilization, and bank foreclosure prevention and remediation programs via the property data portion of its Northeast Ohio Community and Neighborhood Data for Organizing (NEO CANDO)website, and through other research programs.

NEO CANDO is a free online database of social, property, and economic indicators combined with geographic data markers down to the neighborhood level, and mapping utilities, created and maintained by the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development. The Center is one of several research centers at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, a graduate school of social work at Case Western Reserve University .

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Enterprise Community Partners hosted a live online webinar titled: "Using Local Market Data to Support Neighborhood Stabilization." It was held on Thursday, February 10, 2011 from 12:30 PM to 2:00 PM

The Powerpoint presentation for this webinar is now available here online.

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A recent journal article "Getting the Most Out of Service Learning: Maximizing Student, University, and Community Impact" in the Journal of Community Practice, is by professors Mark Chupp and Mark Joseph, is outlined in this |think magazine blog article.

Additional articles about their work, and the efforts of Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences students can bee see in the August and July 2010 articles here.

Both Mark Chupp and Mark Joseph are faculty associates of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development.

The following case study by the Enterprise Foundation, focuses on NEO CANDO and the partnerships that utilize the data it provides to improve the quality of life in neighborhoods.

"Local market data systems are of great value to nonprofits, local governments and other community stakeholders who are working to stabilize neighborhoods struggling as a result of foreclosures, blight, vacancies or economic decline.

In Cleveland, data transformed the focus and implementation of neighborhood stabilization, allowing stabilization efforts to achieve a level of impact that was not otherwise possible....

This case study examines the value of parcel-level real estate data for neighborhood stabilization programs in general, and looks specifically at how the Northeast Ohio Community and Neighborhood Data for Organizing system (NEO CANDO) is used in Cleveland. Examples of some of the ways community stakeholders have used the data generated by the NEO CANDO system are provided. General information describing the operations of the NEO CANDO system, the data used, and the sources of that data are also provided to aid communities considering creating their own local market data system."

This case study is located on practitionerresources.org, where other Enterprise Community Partners resources are also listed.

Dr. Anna Santiago, Dr. George Galster, and Renee Nicolosi, are in a podcast titled, "Where People Live Matters: Using Housing Policy as an Anti-Poverty and Asset-Building Intervention," on the University at Buffalo School of Social Work's Living Proof Podcast series Episode 64.

"In this episode, our guests discuss their research that attempts to respond to and understand how housing policy influences not only its clients, but the neighborhoods in which they reside. They describe, amongst other programs, the Home Ownership Program in Denver, Colorado; their longitudinal research; their findings; and the continuing challenges to sustaining home ownership and its effect on poverty."

If you wish to hear play the mp3 directly click here.

Dr. Santiogo is a Faculty Associate of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, a graduate school of social work at Case Western Reserve University .

A new report from Case Western Reserve’s Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development documents the problem of so-called bank walkaways in Cuyahoga County, Ohio.

The report, titled Stalling the Foreclosure Process: The Complexity Behind Bank Walkaways, takes an in-depth look at stalled foreclosure cases in Cuyahoga County in order to describe the factors involved in delayed foreclosure cases. Foreclosure cases that remain unresolved for long periods of time can result in serious spillover damages, incurring costs like unpaid taxes, unpaid utility bills, nuisance abatement assessments, maintenance, and in the most severe cases, could include fire damage or demolition.

The researchers examined the court records of 999 stalled foreclosure cases (cases where a decree of foreclosure has been granted but the property did not go to sheriff’s sale for over 180 days), finding that 56 percent of these stalled foreclosure cases could possibly be considered bank walkaways. The researchers also found that the possible bank walkaways are more likely to be vacant, tax delinquent, and demolished.

When considering the status of a foreclosure case in court, the researchers determined that cases where a plaintiff (the mortgage lender or subsequent note holder) took no action for 180 days or more after receiving a foreclosure judgment, and cases where a plaintiff dismissed a foreclosure judgment for reasons that did not involve resolving the mortgage lien, among other scenarios, could possibly be considered bank walkaways.

“It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what’s going on with a foreclosure case,” reports Michael Schramm, co-author and Research Associate at the Center on Urban Poverty. "Paper and electronic court records might be missing details, and plaintiffs often only give boiler-plate reasons for their actions. But defining the problem and outlining how to recognize it is the first step in finding the solution.”

Click here to download the file.

For questions or comments about this report, please contact Michael Schramm at 216-368-0206.

This work has been possible using the Center's freely available, social, economic, neighborhood and property information database, NEO CANDO, can be found on the web here.

An article in the Windy City Times, announces a new, feature-length documentary, Cabrini Green: Mixing it Up, which has political and historical analysis provided by Dr. Mark Joseph, of the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, among others. Dr. Joseph studies mixed income housing development in Chicago and other areas.

Since 1995, 23 high-rise buildings have been demolished, that may have contained between 15,000 and 20,000 residents at their peak. New mixed-income developments have been built in some areas to replace these public housing high-rises that now contain an estimated 1,000 residents, of these only about 15% of which are original public housing residents.

"Critics assert that the plan does not eliminate the problem (poverty and the systemic causes of poverty) but merely displaces people and disperses the poverty around the city. Janet Smith, co-author of the report "Where are Poor People to Live," told Bower that only about 15 percent of the displaced Cabrini families are living in the new mixed-income developments that replaced Cabrini. Smith wondered on camera, "who will actually benefit from the Plan for Transformation when it is complete?"

....Cabrini Green: Mixing it Up features students at Jenner Elementary school, one of whom confronts Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley; the Stamps family of educators and activists; and a woman who is one of the few Cabrini residents that qualified to return to live in the new mixed income development. Academics Janet Smith (University of Illinois at Chicago) , Mary Pattillo (Northwestern University) and Mark Joseph (Case Western Reserve University) provide political and historical analysis."

Dr. Joseph is a faculty associate of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, a graduate school of social work at Case Western Reserve University .

The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development is the evaluation partner for Cuyahoga County's Invest in Children Program. Videos summarizing the 2010 annual progress are here.

Videos about the programs' progress, the evaluation and recent benchmarks from the last years are available from the 2010 Annual meeting here. The program is a comprehensive, voluntary, and high quality early care and education program. The video regarding the Universal Pre-Kindergarten Program's evaluation, titled "Universal Pre-Kindergarten: Making a 'BIG' difference," has comments from Dr. Robert Fischer, Co-Director of the Center.

In the videos, Dr. Fischer comments, "... what's very interesting here is that the kids that were lowest performing and lowest developmental scores at baseline show the most dramatic gains, the most meaningful gains in these measures."

For more information regarding the Invest in Children programming please see their web site here, or look on this page for both the Invest in Children and the Early Childhood Initiative Evaluation reports.

The ten year retrospective of the Center's Evaluation of the Invest In Children project, titled "Inform, Influence, Impact, " can be read online or downloaded here.

The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development in partnership with the United Way of Greater Cleveland, has released a series of 12 data briefs on key social demographic and population dimensions of Cuyahoga County. The data briefs address issues related to United Way’s core community priorities, with specific attention to changes in indicators over time. Using data from a range of Census and local sources, the briefs highlight important dimensions of life in Cuyahoga County that can inform approaches to address community needs.

The briefs examine shifts in population (changing demographics, child population, mobility), indicators of risk (poverty, child maltreatment, teen/unmarried births, educational attainment, adult literacy), and indicators of opportunity (employment, public schools, safety net supports, housing affordability).

The United Way of Greater Cleveland used these demographic analyses as a discussion launching point for their request for proposal committee process for the 2011 year. The United Way of Greater Cleveland used these demographic analyses as inputs for their request for proposal committee process for the 2011 year. This social research is
available on our website as individual briefs or one combined .PDF. They are also shared on the United Way server here.

The December 21st article "Poverty up Sharply in Rust Belt" in the politics section of the U.S. News & World Report shows severe increases in poverty levels in Ohio and southern Michigan, deeper than the national average, as reported in the recently released 2009 poverty estimates by the U.S. Census Bureau.

The article quotes Professor Claudia Coulton, Director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development in the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences. Dr. Coulton says that increasing poverty is a sign of a country coming down from the "good times" of the late 1990s and early 2000s, when poverty rates were lower in many areas of the country. "I think what you have is people were just getting above the poverty line when times were good, and now they're falling back below it," says Coulton.

Read the full article.

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"Donors to former County Auditor Frank Russo received more than $1.8 million on their property taxes. Russo has pleaded guilty to taking more than $1 million in bribes over 10 years and will serve more than 21 years in prison," says this Plain Dealer Article.

NEO CANDO, as well as over 2,000 paper documents, and the County Treasurer database are cited as some of the sources of the ongoing Plain Dealer Investigation, of the Cuyahoga County Board of Revision, which incoming County Executive Ed FitzGerald has vowed to completely replace.

The article begins, "Many of the people who contributed to former Cuyahoga County Auditor Frank Russo's election campaigns also went to his office in search of tax breaks -- and got them.

They received hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars off their tax bills thanks to reduced property valuations, a Plain Dealer analysis of campaign-finance reports and county records has found."

The section citing the methods and sources of the report states, "The newspaper used the state's public records laws to acquire county payroll records, campaign finance reports and databases showing reductions of property values. Case Western Reserve University's NEO CANDO, a data system containing demographic, economic and property data, provided the newspaper with county property values from 2003 through 2009.

Reporters also searched Ohio Secretary of State filings and corporate websites to unearth connections between Russo's most generous donors -- those giving $1,000 or more -- and corporate interests that received property reductions."

NEO CANDO is a free online database of social, property, and economic indicators combined with geographic data markers down to the neighborhood level, created and maintained by the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development. The Center is one of several research centers at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, a graduate school of social work at Case Western Reserve University .

Case Western Reserve University will host "Social Justice, Race, and Profiling: An Intergenerational Think Tank" on November 19 and 20, 2010. This event also launches the public program of the newly established, university-wide Social Justice Institute.

View more information at the event's page and download the program.

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An article in Forefront, a publication of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, titled Battling the Next Phase of the Housing Crisis, refers to the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development's research article, "REO and Beyond: The Aftermath of the Foreclosure Crisis in Cuyahoga County, Ohio," on the "rising tide" of Real-Estate Owned Properties in Cuyahoga County.

"The foreclosure crisis is breeding a new one: a crushing load of REO, or real-estate-owned, properties. These are the foreclosed homes that banks and other lenders have on their books after failing to sell them at sheriff’s auctions. In weak housing markets, including many in the Fourth District, these unsold houses too often stand vacant and neglected.

A new volume published by the Federal Reserve Banks of Cleveland and Boston and the Federal Reserve Board of Governors highlights the latest research and on-the ground efforts to attack the REO problem on several fronts. The collection of articles, REO & Vacant Properties: Strategies for Neighborhood Stabilization, was released in September to coincide with a summit hosted by the Federal Reserve in Washington. The summit aimed to help communities and practitioners find the most promising practices for addressing neighborhood stabilization and the disposition of REO properties across the country.

Among the Cleveland-area contributors to the volume were researchers at Case Western Reserve University. The researchers reported a worsening scope to the problem in northeast Ohio, offering new evidence of how REO properties further drag down communities.

In “REO and Beyond: The Aftermath of the Foreclosure Crisis in Cuyahoga County, Ohio,” Claudia Coulton, Mike Schramm, and April Hirsh found:

• Since 2007, almost all properties in Cuyahoga County (home to Cleveland) that come out of foreclosure sales have ended up as REOs.
• The number of REOs in the county peaked in 2008 at just over 10,000 properties and had declined to about 7,300 by late 2009.
• REOs are disproportionately concentrated in lower-income communities.
• From 2004 to 2008, the percentage of properties on Cleveland’s east side that sold out of REO at extremely distressed prices—$10,000 or less—shot up from 4 percent to almost 80 percent.

Read the full "Forefront" article here.

A Plain Dealer article discusses the presentation of the results of the Cuyahoga County child-welfare department review panel. Both Drs. Vicotor Groza, and David Crampton from the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences are on this review panel.

A review panel Wednesday called on the Cuyahoga County child-welfare department to improve the way it manages high-risk families, but it also put responsibility on the community and the next county government to keep children safer.

The panel appointed by Director Deborah Forkas issued 12 pages of recommendations, which deal in large part with beefing up services to combat threats to children from domestic violence, substance abuse and mental illness.

The presentation to an audience of nonprofit social services providers contained criticisms that the agency has not done enough to address risks to children, such as engaging mental health and addiction experts in cases. But the event was also part pep rally to solicit help from outside the county bureaucracy.

"It's not about the department, it's not about Deborah Forkas," said David Crampton, the panel chairman and an associate professor of social work at Case Western Reserve University. "It's about all of us working together to protect our children."

"...For a complete list of recommendations, go to cfs.cuyahogacounty.us and click on "community task force."

Read the full Plain Dealer article here.

Dr. Crampton is a faculty associate of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, a graduate school of social work at Case Western Reserve University .

A Plain Dealer article, discusses the national reclaiming vacant properties conference that is going on this week, and references the work that the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development is doing in partnering with other local government and non-profit groups.

"Cleveland got clobbered early by the foreclosure crisis -- and has been trying to fight back with innovative strategies that will be showcased during a national conference here next week.

The conference -- Reclaiming Vacant Properties: The Intersection of Sustainability, Revitalization and Policy Reform -- runs Wednesday through Friday and is expected to draw about 900 people.

It is organized by the Center for Community Progress, a nonprofit with offices in both Washington, D.C. and Flint, Mich. that works with communities to return vacant or abandoned property to productive use.

"We've seen a lot of progress in Cleveland -- particularly with the foreclosure crisis -- and people are paying attention to the strategies being implemented there," said Jennifer Leonard, the center's vice president.

Cleveland was hit early by the foreclosure crisis and been working on responses longer than many other communities. "We might be a year or two ahead in trying things that others are just starting to look at," said Frank Ford, NPI [Neighborhood Progress Incorporated]'s senior vice president for research and development....

The region has also benefited from collaborations among people in both the city and Cuyahoga County. "A lot of cities and counties haven't figured out ways to do that," Leonard said. Ford said the conference will highlight local initiatives such as the data system known as NEO CANDO, which was developed by Case Western Reserve University researchers and provides certain demographic, economic and property data online and for free.

Among other things, the system's information has been mined to trace a web of mortgage fraud and track the footprint of companies trading in distressed and foreclosed houses.

"It really is a model," Leonard said. "Many cities don't have the information they need to make smart decisions."

The full Plain Dealer article can be read here.

A Cleveland Plain Dealer Article, "Census shows Cleveland is the second-poorest city in the United States," quotes Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences professor Claudia Coulton.

The article begins, "Hard times came to every corner of Northeast Ohio during a historic recession, as unemployment and its consequences rippled across the city and suburbs.

The hammer of despair landed hardest in Cleveland, where one out of every three people lived in poverty at the end of 2009, making Cleveland the second-poorest big city in America -- thank you, Detroit -- according to estimates released Tuesday by the U.S. Census Bureau."

The article continues, "...While much of the region's poverty is rooted in low education levels and high rates of single parenthood, the latest poverty spike is purely economic. This is unemployment poverty, said Claudia Coulton, co-director of the Center on Urban Poverty & Community Development at Case Western Reserve University. And it's not over yet.

'We have not created jobs, not enough to get us out of this unemployment crisis,' she said."

The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, contributed to a Summit and to the joint publication of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston named, "REO & Vacant Properties: Strategies for Neighborhood Stabilization." Resources for stabilizing communities are available off the summit's website.

"The foreclosure crisis that the nation continues to grapple with has led to scores of real-estate-owned, or REO, properties. These and other vacant properties erode the values of nearby houses, fracture neighborhood stability, and threaten to undo decades of economic progress made in communities across the country over the past 25 years. How big is the REO problem? How are communities, banks, and policymakers dealing with the challenge? Most important, what approaches are showing the most promise for success."

The Center's Chapter is titled" REO and Beyond: The Aftermath of the Foreclosure Crisis in Cuyahoga County, Ohio." The full summit report PDF may be obtained here.

The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development is located within the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, a graduate school of social work, at Case Western Reserve University.

A Plain Dealer article, "Cuyahoga County child-welfare agency lacks sense of urgency, panel says" by Harlan Spector says,

"The panel appointed by Department of Children and Family Services Director Deborah Forkas is expected to issue a long list of recommendations this month. But the chairman [Prof. David Crampton,] said there is a lack of urgency at the agency to address ongoing risks to children from parents' mental illness, addictions, domestic violence and other problems. "

"We clearly need some system after the department closes the case to make sure they (parents) stay on their medications and are getting mental health treatment," said Crampton, an associate professor at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences at Case Western Reserve University.

Additional articles about the Cuyahoga County Department of Child and Family Services may be viewed here.

Prof. Crampton is a faculty associate of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, a graduate school of social work at Case Western Reserve University .

Cuyahoga County’s comprehensive early childhood system, Invest in Children, shines in a recently released report by The Urban Institute. In Using Data to Promote Collaboration in Local School Readiness Systems, researchers at the Urban Institute highlight Cuyahoga County as a key example of how to build a community-wide early childhood system to promote school readiness.

The report highlights that in order for children to be truly ready for school they must be supported by a system that includes ready families, ready pre-schools, ready schools and ready communities. “Invest in Children’s multi-faceted approach is forging just such a system”, says Dr. Rebekah Dorman, Invest in Children’s Director, and we are very proud to be recognized in this national publication.”

Funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the report concluded, “The collaboration in Cuyahoga County, Ohio (Cleveland) has perhaps the most impressive record – the Invest in Children Initiative (IIC).” The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, co-directed by Case Western Reserve University faculty members Claudia Coulton and Rob Fischer, participated as a research partner in the study, which included Atlanta, Chattanooga, Denver, Memphis, Miami, Milwaukee, and Providence. The Center is the long-standing independent evaluator of Invest in Children. In late 2009, the Center released a report entitled Inform, Influence, Impact - The Role of Research in Supporting a Community’s Commitment to Its Children, documenting a decade of research by the Center in evaluating the efforts of Cuyahoga County’s work in the area of early childhood.

"Poverty At Record Highs, Unemployment Slowing" is a radio new piece on WCPN quoted Prof Claudia Coulton, Co-director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences on Thursday, September 16, 2010 .

"The U-S Census Bureau released disturbing numbers about the national poverty picture today, while another economic indicator report also shows tough times still ahead for Northeast Ohio. Ideastream®'s Rick Jackson reports.

One of every seven Americans; more than 43 million people, now lives in poverty. Claudia Coulton of the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences at CASE says the 14.3% figure is actually not surprising, due to the depth of this recession....

“This one is worse. It’s pushed us higher in poverty than we’ve been in a long time - as a nation - so it’s different than other recessions where a little bit of government spending and a little bit of loosening up of various government policies turn it around.”

Hear or read more of "Poverty At Record Highs, Unemployment Slowing"

Briefly Stated 10-02: Women Religious in a Changing Urban Landscape: The Work of Catholic Sisters in Metropolitan Cleveland by Rob Fischer & Jenni Bartholomew has been released, and mailed to the community.

Download the report here.

Summary: Women religious play a vital role in many communities in addressing the needs of the poor, neglected, and vulnerable members of society. In the history of Northeast Ohio, Catholic nuns have been instrumental in the arenas of education, healthcare, outreach and advocacy.

In high poverty cities such as Cleveland, women religious continue to provide essential services, supports, and spiritual guidance in many venues. The experience in Cleveland is relevant to cities with an urban core where the population has shifted to suburban areas, leaving inner-city churches with declining membership and support.

In addition, this case example will show how proactive and collaborative efforts on the part of women religious can enhance the likelihood of effectively addressing community needs presently and in the future.

A summary presentation of the results for Women Religious in a Changing Urban Landscape: The Work of Catholic Sisters in Metropolitan Cleveland can be viewed here.

On Tuesday, November 09, 2010, from 11:45 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., David Crampton, Ph.D. will give a talk titled, "Lessons in Child Welfare Reform from Cuyahoga County and Beyond: The Annie E. Casey Foundation's Family to Family Initiative"

Place: The Mandel Center for Nonprofit Organizations, room 115
A light lunch will be served. All are welcome.

Click here to view Dr. Crampton's profile in our experts database Prof. Crampton is a Faculty Associate of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, a graduate school of social work.

Schubert Conversations on Children in Research, Policy, and Practice are monthly seminars featuring cutting-edge research by CWRU faculty, with corresponding commentary by local professionals. These events stimulate an ongoing dialogue about child-related research, policy, and practice among faculty, students, policy experts, advocates, and professionals from Northeast Ohio.

The Mandel Center for Nonprofit Organizations is located at 11402 Bellflower Road on the CWRU campus.

Parking is available on nearby streets and at the Severance Hall or Botanic Garden parking garages. Visitors may not park on Hessler Court or at the lot reserved for L'Albatros or the Spartan Diner.

Handicapped parking is available - please call the Center at 216-368-2275 for details.

Doctoral Candidate Diwakar Vadapalli presented a paper in India, at two separate occasions on collecting, analyzing, and using Social and Economic Indicators, based on the Center on Urban Poverty’s NEO CANDO database model.

The paper: "Indicators, actionable data, and ‘model villages’: NEO CANDO as an example for similar systems in India" by Diwakar K. Vadapalli, and Claudia J. Coulton was presented at: The National Seminar on ‘Building of Model Villages through Panchayat Raj Institutions’ on 10th August, 2010 at The National Institute of Rural Development (NIRD), Hyderabad, India

The second presentation on this same research was titled, "Indicators, actionable data, and local decision-making: NEO CANDO as an example for similar systems in India" also presented by Diwakar K. Vadapalli on Aug 18, 2010 at the invitation of the Institute for Social and Economic Change (ISEC), Bangalore, India.

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An Editorial in the Cleveland Plain Dealer titled, "Cuyahoga Children Services is due a thorough inquiry, but that would require a panel that's truly independent," by The Plain Dealer Editorial Board, discusses the task force review of the Cuyahoga County agency by a committee chaired by Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences Prof. David Crampton.

Crampton emphasized that reviewing individual cases is not essential to the panel's main goal of reviewing systemic problems. Quoting from the article: "Task force chairman David Crampton, a respected child-welfare scholar and associate professor at Case Western Reserve University's Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, understandably bristles at the notion that he or other panelists are being manipulated into a bias in favor of Forkas or her department.

'My job is not to protect the job of a Deb Forkas; it is to have the best child-welfare system in the country,' Crampton says. 'I'm not doing this for any other reason than that.'

He adds that any best-practices review of child welfare won't dwell on a handful of tragedies but instead will take the widest-angled view possible of systemwide practices. "

The full editorial can be read here.

Additional articles about the Cuyahoga County Department of Child and Family Services may be viewed here.

Prof. Crampton is a faculty associate of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, a graduate school of social work at Case Western Reserve University .

An Article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer titled, "Child-welfare agency won't release case files to review panel," by Harlan Spector, discusses the task force review of the Cuyahoga County agency by a committee chaired by Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences Prof. David Crampton.

Crampton emphasized that reviewing individual cases is not essential to the panel's main goal of reviewing systemic problems. Quoting from the article: "The task force is looking specifically at whether the county follows the safest practices when it returns children to their parents after taking temporary custody due to maltreatment." Crampton said: "We need information on a larger number of cases. We don't need to see case files, but we need to see system issues."

The full article can be read here.

Additional articles about the Cuyahoga County Department of Child and Family Services may be viewed here.

Prof. Crampton is a faculty associate of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, a graduate school of social work at Case Western Reserve University .

MSASS Professor Learns More About Schools' Role in Revitalizing Neighborhoods

"Before parents with young children buy a new home, they want to know the quality of the neighborhood public schools.

Mark Joseph, assistant professor at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences at Case Western Reserve University, does too. He's examining how public schools have a role in revitalizing urban neighborhoods—especially neighborhoods where new mixed-income developments are being built.

He's particularly interested in housing under development in Chicago and other major cities with HOPE VI funds from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Joseph and Jessica Feldman from the University of Chicago report challenges facing these schools in the article, "Creating and Sustaining Successful Mixed-Income Communities: Conceptualizing the Role of Schools," which appeared in the journal Education and Urban Society.

In a prior study, Joseph found that the income groups do not always mix in these housing situations and many middle-class families do not have children. But schools can shake things up. According to Joseph, they are a critical component in linking middle-class families and lower-income families to the broader social and economic mainstream."

More of the THINK article, "MSASS Professor Learns More About Schools' Role in Revitalizing Neighborhoods"

Click for more of Mark L. Joseph's research.

The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development is located within the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, a graduate school of social work, at Case Western Reserve University.

Bouncing Back: Report documents foreclosure crisis and community response in Greater Cleveland.

"The subprime mortgage crisis left tens of thousands of foreclosed homes in its wake, more than 10,000 in the Greater Cleveland area alone, according to a new report.

But new research from Case Western Reserve University's Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, Cleveland State University and the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland does more than illuminate grim statistics-it also documents how community groups mobilized to respond to the crisis.

The study's co-authors, Claudia Coulton from Case Western Reserve and Kathy Hexter from Cleveland State University, say they hope sharing Cleveland's story can help other cities in their own struggles.

'Facing the Foreclosure Crisis in Cleveland: What Happened and How Communities Are Responding' weaves together research from previous studies conducted by the poverty center, providing dozens of examples of community responses, ranging from government reform and legislation to counseling and prevention initiatives."


More of the THINK article, "Bouncing Back"

Get this report and others about the effects and size of Cleveland's Foreclosures crisis.

The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development is located within the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, a graduate school of social work, at Case Western Reserve University.

Professor Rob Fischer Co-Director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development was quoted in the Sandusky Register article, "Will Commissioner Cole help defeat another stereotype?" by Jason Singer, regarding Commissioner Diedre Cole living in public housing within the City of Sandusky on whose council she will serve, when Commissioner Brett Fuqua resigns to take a position in Columbus.

Directly quoting the article, "Local residents say Diedre Cole is many things: A lightning rod, articulate, charismatic, opinionated.

She's also historic....Once she's sworn in, Cole may be the first person in state history to serve in an elected position while also living in public housing."

The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development is located within the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, a graduate school of social work, at Case Western Reserve University.

A Cleveland Plain Dealer article, "Cuyahoga County Council District 8 voters have high hopes for new government" by Sandy Livingston uses data from the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development to help put the race for District 8's Council seat in perspective. This article reviews the general concerns of this ward and summarizes the experience and backgrounds of the candidates for the ward's counsel seat.

"Cuyahoga County Council District 8 is a microcosm of the region's assets and troubles.

Covering Cleveland Wards 2, 5 and 6 as well as Garfield Heights and Maple Heights, the district includes the Cleveland Clinic's main campus, eclectic shops and eateries along Larchmere Boulevard, Cuyahoga Community College, the Midtown business district, swaths of urban and inner-ring residential neighborhoods, and highway proximity that has drawn warehouse and distribution centers.

It is the county district with the second-lowest average household income, the second- highest poverty rate, the largest concentration of public housing, and -- according to data from Case Western Reserve University [from NEO CANDO]-- the highest numbers of new foreclosure filings in recent years."

NEO CANDO, Northeast Ohio Community and Neighborhood Data for Organizing, is a free and publicly accessible social and economic data system of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, which is housed at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, a graduate school of social work, at Case Western Reserve University. NEO CANDO allows users to access data for the entire 17 county Northeast Ohio region, or for specific neighborhoods within Cleveland.

As reported by WKYC Channel 3, foreclosures in Cuyahoga County have risen by more than 12% than the first half of 2009. The report uses data from the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development's NEO CANDO (Northeast Ohio Community and Neighborhood Data for Organizing) that shows 7,440 foreclosure actions were filed through May while only 6,604 were filed in the first six months of the previous year.

Foreclosure counselors, including Tom Tusuksri of the Cleveland Housing Network, cite that unemployment and underemployment are a cause in the recent upswing in homeowners being unable to cover their mortgages in Cuyahoga County.

Read the full article "Cuyahoga County: New foreclosures blamed on unemployment" on WKYC.com and watch the televisized segment which aired on June 20, 2010.

Please note, the information obtained by WKYC was not, as is stated in the article, from a survey conducted by the Poverty Center but from data publicly shared in NEO CANDO.

A Plain Dealer Article "Foreclosure filings increase in Cuyahoga County during first half of the year" by reporter Sandra Livingston draws on data from the Center on Urban Poverty's NEO CANDO, social, economic, and property data system.

"New foreclosure filings in Cuyahoga County rose more than 12 percent during the first six months of this year, with the suburbs continuing to feel the brunt of the increases.

Residential and commercial foreclosure filings hit 7,440 in the first half of the year compared to 6,604 in the same period last year, according to data compiled by Case Western Reserve University's Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development."

The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development is housed at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, a graduate school of social work, at Case Western Reserve University.

The Cuyahoga County Planning Commission displays Cuyahoga County Council District Social and Economic profiles using NEO CANDO data.

"Cuyahoga County Council Districts Social and Economic Profiles

The new Cuyahoga County charter created a county executive-county council form of government. Residents in each of the 11 geographic districts will elect a representative to serve on the county council. As part of the transition to the new structure, we are providing the maps and statistics below to better inform constituents and candidates.

Please visit the Transition Advisory Group for more information about the changes in county government."

These profiles contain:
"A selection of demographic indicators for Cuyahoga County's new council districts

* Population
* Age
* Persons and Poverty
* Families and Poverty
* Household Income
* Household Income by Source
* Education
* Public Assistance
* Foreclosures"

NEO CANDO, Northeast Ohio Community and Neighborhood Data for Organizing, is a free and publicly accessible social and economic data system of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, which is housed at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, a graduate school of social work, at Case Western Reserve University. NEO CANDO allows users to access data for the entire 17 county Northeast Ohio region, or for specific neighborhoods within Cleveland.

The 2010 Regionally Speaking SJA/I series leaders

The 2010 Regionally Speaking series focuses on the Social Justice Alliance Institute (SJA/I) at Case Western Reserve. SJA/I is working toward equal access to opportunity for all people through understanding and addressing the root causes of social injustice while developing innovative solutions. A few blocks from Case Western Reserve is the municipality of East Cleveland. An integral part of the SJA/I is the Collaborative Research Project and its impact on the community. Campus members are invited to join in on the conversation with the SJA/I leaders, Rhonda Williams, the program's director and associate professor of history; Marilyn Sanders Mobley, vice president for inclusion, diversity and equal opportunity; and Mark Chupp, project director and assistant professor at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, to learn about goals and implementation plans. Regionally Speaking, a virtual symposium, is hosted by Gladys Haddad, director of the Western Reserve Studies Symposium. Listen online.

Briefly Stated no. 10-01, "Service Learning in Community Development: Partnering with East Cleveland" by David G. Harris & Mark G. Chupp has been released. Electronic copies are available here, and hard copies will be shared with partners in the community.

Summary:
Residents of East Cleveland are fighting to improve the quality of pubic education and access to vocational opportunities. “White flight,” economic disinvestment, and ineffective political leadership have led to the disadvantages faced by East Cleveland (Kathi & Cooper, 2005). Nearly 1,200 vacant structures blight their 3.1 square mile landscape. Case Western Reserve University recognizes the potential roles that they can serve in aiding neighboring East Cleveland into becoming a desirable place to call home.

Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences students joined residents and firefighters to survey every vacant property in the City. Students utilized their experiences with conducting the survey, and through additional fieldwork, recommended strategies for the impact of vacant housing on topics like workforce development, education, safe streets and neighborhoods, and the senior population.

Download file

This research, aided in part by the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences at Case Western Reserve University serves as the basis for a partnership for the revitalization of East Cleveland with contributions from students, faculty, and the university who are collaborating with residents, community organizations, and the City of East Cleveland.

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Richard M. Todd, Vice President of Community Affairs of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis has completed a short paper, "Report No. 2010-2 Foreclosures on Non-Owner-Occupied Properties in Ohio’s Cuyahoga County: Evidence from Mortgages Originated in 2005–2006," using data on non-owner-occupied properties in Cuyahoga County which was obtained from the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences.

"Abstract: One aspect of the past decade's housing boom was an increase in mortgage borrowing by non-occupant owners of residential property. Using data on the 50 states and the District of Columbia, Breck Robinson and Richard M. Todd summarize some of the basic facts regarding home purchases and mortgage borrowing and default by non-occupants who borrowed from 2004 to 2007[in the longer national focused paper linked below].

However, partly due to data limitations, few studies have examined home buying, borrowing, and mortgage default by non-occupant owners using detailed neighborhood and demographic data, including census tract data on the race and ethnicity of the non-occupant owners who borrowed and subsequently experienced foreclosure.

I do so here, using results from loan and foreclosure data on Cuyahoga County, Ohio, that were compiled by researchers at Case Western Reserve University for loans originated in 2005–2006. I find that the incidence of non-occupant foreclosures in Cuyahoga County was very high by national standards and was even higher for loans to minority borrowers made by non-local lenders in low-cost, low-income, minority neighborhoods...."

The more complete national analysis of non-occupant mortgages and foreclosures is titled, "No. 10-11 The Role of Non-Owner-Occupied Homes in the Current Housing and Foreclosure Cycle," by Breck L. Robinson and Richard M. Todd. There, Center data was used to validate another dataset.

A new report from Case Western Reserve University's Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, Cleveland State University and the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, documents the foreclosure crisis and community responses in Greater Cleveland.

The new report "Facing the Foreclosure Crisis in Greater Cleveland: What happened and How Communities Are Responding," weaves together updated research from Pathways to Foreclosure, Foreclosure and Beyond, and Beyond REO with over a dozen examples of community responses to the foreclosure crisis that range from government reform and legislation to counseling and prevention initiatives.

The report finds that in Cleveland and Cuyahoga County, subprime mortgages, in some sections of the city and suburbs, rapidly supplanted conventional loans as the primary product for home purchases and refinances. By 2005, more than 10,000 foreclosures were filed on residential properties in a single year. A growing number of properties entered prolonged periods of vacancy, stuck either in the foreclosure process or in REO—real-estate portfolios of mortgage companies and servicers.

Untended properties deteriorated and were vandalized. The value of housing stock plummeted, leading speculators to buy REO properties in some neighborhoods in bulk and for pennies on the dollar. Neighborhoods with large African-American populations were particularly hard hit by foreclosures and the negative spillover effects.

But Greater Cleveland did not sit idly by; this report also documents our response. Local governments, non-profit organizations, and community groups mobilized to educate potential home buyers, prevent foreclosures, and rehabilitate vacant properties. They have coordinated their efforts and responded strategically, using data to drive their actions. In addition, groups have worked to mediate issues on-the-ground and at the policy level, working to prevent this crisis from ever happening again.

Download the "Facing the Foreclosure Crisis in Greater Cleveland: What happened and How Communities Are Responding" report

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University of Pittsburgh's, University Center for Social and Urban Research (UCSUR), spoke with three national experts about the value & use of Neighborhood Information Systems on UCSUR Radio.

* Interview 1: Kathy Pettit, Co-Director of the The National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP) (www.urban.org/nnip)

* Interview 2: Robert N. Renner from HUD (www.huduser.org)

* Interview 3: Michael Schramm, Associate Director for Community Information, Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, Case Western Reserve University (neocando.case.edu) (povertycenter.case.edu)

Professor Cyleste Collins's, Poverty Center's research was mentioned in an article about population estimates for Cleveland for the 2010 census results, in The Plain Dealer's "Counting Cleveland's citizens," by Mark Salling and Ellen Cyran

The article suggests that the population of Cleveland will not be under the 350,000 mark as some people are predicting, and gives some supporting rationale for this.

"...But where are families that lost their homes? [Cuyahoga] County records show that foreclosure filings in Cleveland are around 7,300 per year. Speculation includes that they are moving: (1) away from the city; (2) in with relatives or friends; and (3) into rental units.

Data from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey show that rental vacancy rates are down, and researchers at the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development at Case Western Reserve University found evidence of doubling-up with other families. We can hope that the 2010 census will also find that population."

This research refers to the White paper and the Briefly Stated No. 09-03, April 2009 titled "Family Homelessness in Cuyahoga County" authored by Profs. Cyleste Collins, and Claudia Coulton, and by PHD candidate Seok-Joo Kim

The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development is located within the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, a graduate school of social work, at Case Western Reserve University.

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University Circle's new website contains a section called, "I found my education in University Circle."

This website features a video of Diwakar, in the Center on Urban Poverty, at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, at Case Western University, and around University Circle speaking about his love of the area and his enjoyment of the richness of the region.

"Diwakar Vadapalli is a Case Western Reserve University PhD student and teaching assistant at The Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences. His research and work at the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development has been enriched by studying in Cleveland's cultural mecca. Originally from Srikakulam, India and having spent time in places as far apart as Kansas and Alaska, he now lives in downtown Cleveland with his wife, Manjula, and commutes to the Circle on the HealthLine everyday."

Regionally Speaking:
Every Monday at 1:30PM on WRUW-FM 91.1
June 21, 2010
Listen to this radio program online here: Coming Together through Stories

The Living Through Legacies Project brings together older citizens from McGregor Home in East Cleveland with students from Case Western Reserve University.

Generations come together and the histories of the seniors are recorded. This week Regionally Speaking's Gladys Haddad brings together the director of the program David Harris, along with a interviewer and interviewee who participated in the Living Through Legacies Project.

Director David Harris, MSSA, was a recent Community Development intern at the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development during the time he started the program, and is also a recent Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences graduate.

Case Western Reserve University's, Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development (CUPCD) is partnered with the University of Pittsburgh's Interactive Database of Neighborhood Conditions and Stats called Pittsburgh Neighborhood and Community Information System (PNCIS) through the National Neighborhood Indicator Partnership (NNIP).

Pitt's Interactive Database of Neighborhood Conditions and Stats is gaining traction in revitalizing Pittsburgh citizens, community organizers, and city planners who use Pitt's online Pittsburgh Neighborhood and Community Information System. Researchers from NNIP including Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences' Mike Schramm, will discuss its value in reducing blight, expanding services, and renewing communities at inaugural users conference June 11, 2009.

"Mike Schramm from Case Western Reserve University's Center for Urban Poverty and Community Development will recount how Case Western's data system [NEO CANDO] was used to reduce foreclosures and help to stabilize communities affected by the 2009 foreclosure crisis in the Cleveland area." at this conference.

Also speaking are:

Kathy Pettit, codirector of the Washington D.C.-based Urban Institute's National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership, will discuss innovative uses of community information systems across the nation and their role in neighborhood development

and,

Robert Renner from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's Office of Policy Development and Research will talk about the growing role of research at HUD, new neighborhood revitalization programs, and the implications for local communities and neighborhood information systems.

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Dr. Claudia Coulton, is quoted in the Lake County, News Herald article ""Predicting what the Census will show us," regarding her predictions of demographic changes that the 2010 Census results may show. The article discusses planning with Lake County Planning Commission Director Jason Boyd, and has emphasis on anticipated changes in demographics of Lake County.

In part the article states, "Claudia Coulton is co-director of Case Western Reserve University's Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development.

The organization's research and study encompasses 17 counties, including Lake and Geauga.

Coulton believes the Census data will show the region's poverty rate increased from 2000.

'But I think the geographical location of people will have shifted,' she said.

Coulton explained that many poor and middle-income families have moved from inner Cleveland to the suburbs or even out of Cuyahoga County.

Some families also may have chosen to double up with other families, she added. Read the complete article here."

For information on recent research of doubled up families in Cuyahoga County please check here: doubled up homelessness.

Claudia J. Coulton is Co-director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, the Lillian F. Harris Professor of Urban Research & Social Change, at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, at Case Western Reserve University More about Dr. Coulton's work can be obtained here.

An article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, discussing The Harlem Children's Zone project and Cleveland's bid for Federal Promise Neighborhood funding to replicate it, quotes David Miller Phd.

The article begins, "What can be done to help families heal and move beyond generations of broken homes, neglect and embedded poverty?

It's a tough problem to tackle -- and an expensive one.

The acclaimed Harlem Children's Zone project in New York City spends $40 million a year to wrap low-income families in a blanket of services, including day care and schools, health care, counseling and job training. During his campaign, President Barack Obama hailed the concept as the future for erasing urban poverty...." Read More.

"We need to intervene and intercept" youths before they follow the wrong role model, said David Miller, a Case Western Reserve University professor who developed an "Urban Hassles Index" to draw attention to constant stress faced by urban youths."

David B. Miller is an Associate Professor, at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, and a Faculty Associate of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, at Case Western Reserve University More about Dr. Miller's work can be obtained here.

A Plain Dealer editorial urges a deeper look at the challenges faced by the Cuyahoga County Department of Children and Family Services as "an insider panel of well-regarded experts" begins meeting to advise the county on improving child welfare practices.

A Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences Faculty member, David Crampton is chairing the committee on which this editorial comments.

The editorial states: "The chair of the current reform panel, David Crampton, an associate professor at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences at Case Western Reserve University, came aboard at the invitation of Deborah Forkas, the beleaguered director of children's services. He is concerned about what he sees as a tight July deadline to identify the department's weaknesses and recommend improvements."

Dr. Crampton commented on recent child welfare-related tragic events on WCPN's Sound of Ideas, "Decreasing Child Abuse," Friday, February 26, 2010 here, and in the Plain Dealer Community cooperation, not Plain Dealer criticism, will ensure the welfare of our children — a Letter to the editor of The Plain Dealer, on March 8, 2010.

David Crampton is also a Faculty Associate of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, Case Western Reserve University. More about Dr. Crampton's work can be obtained here.

An article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which interviews four sons of the alleged victims of Anthony Sowel, quotes David Miller Phd.

The article states, "All four say the cycle of neglect will stop with them," speaking about the neglect that each of them experienced from his parents, and of his dedication to changing that pattern.

"Out of this horrible mess and madness, these men are saying, 'We want to take what we've learned and put it to use so that our children will not have to experience anything like this,' " said David Miller, associate professor at Case Western Reserve University's Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences.

They will need a lot of help to shelter their children from poverty, drugs and crime, added Miller, who believes Cleveland's leaders, especially policymakers and pastors, should work harder to regenerate families. "

David B. Miller is an Associate Professor, at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, and a Faculty Associate of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, at Case Western Reserve University More about Dr. Miller's work can be obtained here.

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Families often think about recording the great stories their elders tell, but they often don’t manage to get written. Then family memories are lost due to illness or death.

For 12 older citizens from the McGregor Home in East Cleveland and the Fairfax Neighborhood on Cleveland’s east side, their histories have been preserved by the Living through Legacies project in hardcover books for families to cherish from one generation to the next.

These individuals became the focus of Case Western Reserve University social work student David Harris, who graduated on Sunday. He published the individual biographies with support from the McGregor Foundation grant.

Nineteen CWRU students aided Harris in producing the memoirs by interviewing, recording the oral histories, writing text and collecting photographs and other materials. Twelve undergraduates used the experience as a service learning project or coursework, while seven graduate students used it as part of their fieldwork for the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences.

Please read original post in The Daily or continue below.

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Dr. Claudia Coulton, professor and co-director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, is quoted in the Cleveland Plain Dealer article "New study reveals that 'family flight' is reshaping Cleveland and Northeast Ohio" on the problems of urban flight of households with children.

"'White flight' described the rush of white families to the suburbs in the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s, observers talked of "middle-class flight" to reflect black residents who had joined the tide. A new pattern may demand a new label. Research shows that an exodus of moms and dads of all races and income levels -- family flight -- is reshaping Cleveland and its region."

"This is definitely not trivial," said Dr. Coulton. "I think we're losing households with children and we're losing children, period... Both middle-class and low-income families are leaving the city. And parents tend to leave because they're trying to get a better future for their children."

Read the entire article at Cleveland.com.

Having grown up in poverty and lived in substandard housing has brought sensitivity to Anna Maria Santiago's social work research about how people live and how place affects their lives.

The Case Western Reserve University campus recently met Santiago, the inaugural holder of the Leona Bevis & Marguerite Haynam Professorship in Community Development at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, during a special reception.

Currently on the faculty at Wayne State University, Santiago will officially start at CWRU on July 1. Her arrival will build on the social work school's strength in neighborhood research by faculty members Mark Chupp, Claudia Coulton, Rob Fischer, Mark Joseph, Sharon Milligan and others from the Center on Poverty and Community Development.

"Place matters," Santiago says. "Where one lives has a tremendous influence on the resources available to the individual."

It's a finding emerging from her research with hundreds of families in public housing and who are raising thousands of children in Denver.

Schools, grocery stores, police protection, medical facilities and libraries are the kinds of resources not equally distributed among neighborhoods, Santiago said.

It was those kinds of resources—and in particular access to training in music and the arts in Milwaukee with progressive social services and neighborhood programs—and her mother's value of education, Santiago attributes to her success.

"I would not be where I am today," she said, noting that the opportunity to master the oboe earned her a college scholarship to the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. She later changed her major to geography in the social sciences, with a specialization in the Caribbean and Latin America.

After working as a social worker in her old neighborhood in Milwaukee, she went on to earn a PhD in urban social institutions from UW Milwaukee.

Santiago is the lead investigator on two major projects that involve families and children from the Denver Housing Authority: "Not Just Buying a Home: The Effects of Participation in Homeownership Programs On Building Human, Financial and Social Capital Assets of Subsidized Housing Residents and their Children," funded by The Ford Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; and "Magnitudes and Mechanisms of Neighborhood Impacts on Children: Analyzing a Natural Experiment in Denver," supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

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In this Update:

Case Western Reserve Project Aims to Provide Thousands with Broadband Access

Download Map of Internet Coverage focus area

The Federal Communications Commission’s new National Broadband Plan calls for connecting more Americans to broadband Internet access as a way of improving U.S. society and transforming industry.

Case Western Reserve University is already doing its part to help a major segment of the Cleveland population through its new Case Connection Zone pilot research project, designed to provide broadband access to local residents and Case Western Reserve students who call the neighborhoods surrounding campus home.

The project, announced late last fall, is moving full speed ahead with dozens of neighborhood residents now signed up for the pilot phase.

Research from the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences suggests that a large number of households in communities surrounding the university do not have Internet access. The Case Connection Zone pilot project aims to close the gap.

The project is more than just an opportunity for residents to log onto the Internet for leisure. According to Case Western Reserve officials leading the initiative, the program has software in place to meet specific metrics and goals such as contributing to neighborhood and public safety; increasing completion rates of high school Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) subjects; monitoring and identifying chronic health conditions for increases in wellness education; and increasing knowledge of and participation in household and neighborhood energy education and management.

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Housingpolicy.org has re-released the Podcast "Neighborhood Stabilization" featuring Prof Claudia Coulton, Originally Released in December 2008.

In this month's podcast," Housingpolicy.org hears from Claudia Coulton, Professor and Co-Director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development operates a comprehensive database, North East Ohio Community and Neighborhood Data for Organizing (NEO CANDO), providing public access to neighborhood indicators and property information for the entire region. In this podcast, Coulton discusses how the data collected through NEO CANDO are helping to shape foreclosure prevention and intervention policies in Cleveland.

This podcast is available through iTunes here.

The Center changed its name from the Center on Urban Poverty and Social Change in September of 2006, but the podcast's official naming and summary on iTunes, and HousingPolicy.org use the previous name. The above summary closely paraphrases this description.

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2010 Census count can mean millions in funding for Lakewood
By Kate Spirgen, Sun News

"LAKEWOOD - Census forms are beginning to appear in mailboxes all over the country, waiting for residents to answer 10 questions that can mean millions of dollars for the city. The 2010 survey will determine funding for some of Lakewood’s most vital services such as street repairs, human services, student programming and emergency assistance to those in need.

With a population of more than 50,000, Lakewood qualifies for Community Block Development Grants, Title 1 school funds and entitlement status from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. However, that income could disappear in the next few years as the city’s population falls.

Case Western Reserve University’s Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development estimates that the city’s total population was 50,704 in 2008, down about 6,000 since the 2000 census."

The complete article can be read here.

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Community cooperation, not Plain Dealer criticism, will ensure the welfare of our children — a Letter to the editor of
The Plain Dealer, on March 8, 2010.

David Crampton, associate professor of social work at Case Western Reserve University's Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, and Faculty Associate of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, writes a letter to the editor of the Plain Dealer about newspaper coverage focusing on recent child neglect cases.

Prof. Mark Joseph, Faculty Associate of the Center for Urban Poverty and Community Development, and Assistant Professor at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences at Case Western Reserve University was interviewed by Steven Webb for the show Information Saint John on Radio One, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

The broadcast titled, "Learning From Mixed Income Housing Projects In The States" aired on March 4th, and the podcast can be found here. The program draws on Prof. Joseph's five-year research on residents of mixed income housing developments in Chicago, Illinois, and applies it to possible mixed-income projects in Saint John's Crescent Valley.

The inaugural Research To Practice Seminar Series titled, “The Data Difference – Using Evaluation Research to Inform Policy and Practice in Early Childhood” - was held on March 4th, 2010 at the Mandel Center for Non-Profit Organizations Co-Sponsored by the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences Office of Research & Training, the MSASS Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, & the Schubert Center for Child Studies.

The Panelists were:
Claudia Coulton, Ph.D., Lillian Harris Professor and Co-Director, Center on Urban Poverty & Community Development, Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences

Rob Fischer, Ph.D., Research Associate Professor and Co-Director, Center on Urban Poverty & Community Development, Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences

Rebekah Dorman, Ph.D., Director, Office of Early Childhood/Invest in Children, Cuyahoga County

Robert Staib, MSSA, Associate Director, Office of Early hildhood/Invest in Children, Cuyahoga County

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"State TANF Policies and Employment Outcomes among Welfare Leavers," by Younghee Lim, Claudia J. Coulton, and Nina Lalich

Social Service Review December 2009, Vol. 83, No. 4: 525-555. DOI: 10.1086/650532 is available here.

This study examines the influence of state welfare policies on employment outcomes of women leaving welfare during the initial period of welfare reform implementation. The study finds that the stringency of work requirements is likely to increase employment among later welfare leavers, but neither the leniency nor stringency of work requirements is related to employment among early welfare leavers. The study finds that lenient work requirements are found to increase the probability that welfare leavers’ first jobs off welfare carry employer-provided health insurance.

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Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development Faculty Associate, and Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences Associate Professor David Crampton participated in a panel discussion of ways to prevent child abuse.

The Sound of Ideas® "Decreasing Child Abuse" for Friday, February 26, 2010

The brief description of the subject mater was described on the website as, "The arrest of two local mothers for allegedly murdering their young children raises the question: Is enough being done to prevent child abuse?"

Professor Crampton emphasized the importance of prevention efforts such as Cuyahoga County's Invest in Children Initiative Once families do become involved in child welfare services, Professor Crampton suggested there is a need for community support as well as government support.

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A WCPN radio article Doubled-Up in Northeast Ohio, on Friday, February 26, 2010, cites part of a longer interview with Prof. Cyleste Collins of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development regarding the number of doubled-up homeless families in Cuyahoga County.

This article, in part refers to her white paper on the topic and its policy brief summary, "Briefly Stated No. 09-03, Family Homelessness in Cuyahoga County" which was released in July of 2009. A brief description of this work can be found here.

A brief radio article, also on WCPN, referencing this white paper was previously released and can be read or heard here.

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A front-page, Sunday Plain Dealer article, "New Mayor Gary Norton hopes to bring big changes to struggling East Cleveland" on February 14, 2010, discusses planned changes in East Cleveland using the federal stimulus community development block grant funding for vacant and foreclosed properties and the efforts of the new Mayor, Gary Norton, to revive the city.

The article discusses a kick-off introduction event, hosted by the Social Justice Alliance, and organized by Professor Mark Chupp of the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, during which Mayor Gary Norton took interested leaders on a tour of the city and discussed economic revitalization plans for specific neighborhoods and his economic development vision for the community.

The East Cleveland planning partnership and coalitions are being built include the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences(MSASS), Case Western Reserve University, the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development at MSASS as a data partner, and other organizations. Maps of the planned area for economic development and also of foreclosed, vacant or abandoned houses in the city were provided for the tour by the Center.

The full article may be read here.

The full Case Daily article may be read here.

For a Case video on the partnership click here.

Cleveland sees big drop in foreclosure filings By Ken Prendergast February 05, 2010, 6:22PM

"CLEVELAND While the number of property foreclosure filings increased in Cuyahoga County last year, they fell dramatically in one city.

Cleveland saw its foreclosure filings drop nearly 20 percent in 2009, according to data compiled by Case Western Reserve University’s Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development.

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An article in the Cleveland Scene:

OPPORTUNITY OR OPPORTUNISM: East-side residents wary of "Opportunity Corridor" proposal by DAMIAN GUEVARA

This article uses census figures from NEO CANDO for context about about a neighborhood through which the proposed "Opportunity Corridor" road would, "connect the end of interstates 77 and 490 (at East 55th Street) to East 105th Street and the University Circle district."

The article start, "Opportunity fled Emma Barnes' Kinsman neighborhood decades ago, along with the white people who flew to the suburbs and the industry that closed up shop (but conveniently forgot to take its toxic waste). Kinsman earned the bleak tag of "Forgotten Triangle." Barnes, 79, has lived among the neglect all her life, but local government and big business want to assure her that prosperity is on the way."

Read the full article here.

The Associate Director for Community Information at the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, Michael Schramm, was quoted on WCPN's article, "Lorain Co. Sees Foreclosures Spike."

In Summary the article says, "Lorain County officials this week reported a record high number of mortgage foreclosure filings in 2009, following a pattern being seen regionally. ideastream®'s Rick Jackson looks at the meaning behind the increases.

Lorain County saw mortgage foreclosure filings jump 30 percent in 2009 over 2008 - more percentage-wise than in Cuyahoga County, where filings were up 20 percent."

The article can be heard or viewed here.

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A short video about the East Cleveland Partnership initiated by the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences is featured in this Case Youtube video with MSASS Professor Mark Chupp, an advocate for university-community partnerships for neighborhood revitalization. Michelle Felder, an East Cleveland resident, is also featured.

"East Cleveland is not a dying city. There are people here who are committed in the long term to making this a great place. Our students and we, as faculty, designed a survey project to survey every vacant property in the city of East Cleveland. The goal was to determine which houses are suitable for rehab and which houses need to be demolished, because federal funds are designated for demolition and rehab. One of the things that I believe is possible through this East Cleveland Community Partnership is really the revitalization of East Cleveland so that it becomes a destination for people wanting to work in East Cleveland but it also becomes a safer, revitalized place for people who live here." said Professor Chupp.

The students' data has been collated, matched and mapped down to a parcel level through the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development using GIS mapping techniques. This survey data and the maps generated have been presented to the City to help inform the discussion between the administration and the citizens for planning the use of the federal stimulus funding.

"I love the neighborhood. I love the community...Its a community of people who work, who love their neighborhood....If you look down most of the streets its a beautiful place," said Michelle Felder.

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A front page Plain Dealer article cites the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development's NEO CANDO economic, social, and properties indicators database's numbers regarding the foreclosures in Cuyahoga County in the last four years:2006-2009.

"Foreclosure filings clobbered Cuyahoga County again in 2009, and the economic misery is spreading deeper into the suburbs.... The county saw nearly 14,800 new foreclosure filings last year -- a number virtually unchanged from 2008."

"'If this is the new norm, it's all bad news,' said Cuyahoga County Treasurer Jim Rokakis....And he takes no solace from the fact that total filings last year were almost unchanged from the year before. 'Flat at such a really high number . . .I still think speaks to an almost cataclysmic state of affairs,' Rokakis said."

The article brings attention to the movement of the foreclosure problem from the city of Cleveland proper out to the suburbs even though the relative numbers for the whole of Cuyahoga County have remained steady.

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"The residents of West 83rd street were shaken from their daily routines last Monday when an abandoned house on their street exploded, leaving 6 families homeless and 57 other buildings badly damaged. As it turns out, the owner of the house --- a real estate company --- is based hundreds of miles away in California, barely aware of what’s happening to the Cleveland property. ideastream®’s Ida Lieszkovszky has this update."

An interview with the Cuyahoga County Treasurer, Jim Rokakis regarding the absentee owner of the house that exploded on West 83rd street, cites The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development's studies and NEO CANDO neighborhood and property database, as well as Neighborhood Progress Incorporated's data:

"Rokakis: There are dozens of companies like EZ Access. We estimate, and these are studies done by the folks and NEO CANDO and NPI that at least 80 % of properties that have been foreclosed, we’re talking thousands, have already been dumped by the major players to companies that buy these props in bulk."

The full article can be read or heard here.

"Cleaning Up After the Foreclosure Tsunami: Tackling Bank Walk-Aways and Vulture Investors," is an article in the Fall/Winter 2009 issue of Shelterforce, a magazine published by the National Housing Institute.

In the article cites The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development's publicly accessible 'NEO CANDO' property data system and its working partnerships with the Cleveland Housing Court, The Cleveland Housing Network, and The County Land Re-utilization Corporation as among Cleveland's innovative, "tools and programs for responsible management and redevelopment of abandoned and foreclosed property."

The full article can be read here.

A scan of the article with photographs can be viewed using the link on this web page.

This article was written by Frank Ford, Senior Vice President for Research & Development of Neighborhood Progress Inc., a funder and partner of the Center.

"South Euclid offers warning about home foreclosure issues" By Jeff Piorkowski

A South Euclid Sun Messenger Article speaks with South Euclid Housing Manager Sally Martin, and cites the City's use of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development's NEO CANDO social, economic and neighborhood data to alert home-owners with a high potential of foreclosure as an early warning system so that they may act to avoid foreclosure.

The article states, "Last fall, the city sent letters to 750 homeowners with adjustable rate mortgages and who could be in danger of foreclosure this year.

The letters, which urged that homeowners take the proper steps to save their homes, were sent after the city received information on housing projections from NEO CANDO —the Northeast Ohio Community and Neighborhood Data for Organizing, a research institute housed at Case Western Reserve University. That information told of homeowners in possible danger of foreclosure."

In the article, Martin suggests that homeowners contact ESOP(Empowering and Strengthening Ohio’s People) for counseling and help.

The Center recommends contacting United Way of Greater Cleveland's First Call for Help at phone number 211, for HUD licensed counselors- who will work with a homeowner to assess the specific situation and who may also refer a caller to ESOP while helping to create a plan of action.

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The newly formed American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare (AASWSW) will have its virtual home at Case Western Reserve University's Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences over the next three years.

Claudia Coulton, the Lillian F. Harris Professor of social work and co-director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development at the social work school, has been named one of the founding fellows. She also is the inaugural treasurer of the organization to advance the social work profession.

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Finding Place in Making Connections Communities: Applying GIS to Residents’ Perceptions of Their Neighborhoods
By Claudia J. Coulton, Tsui Chan, And Kristen Mikelbank, January 2010

Download file

ABSTRACT
The growing recognition that place matters has led to numerous foundation- and government-sponsored initiatives that address the needs of disadvantaged neighborhoods and families in tandem. Fundamental to these people-based and place-based strategies is the assumption that residents are both the beneficiaries and the cocreators of improvements in their neighborhoods and the systems that serve them. However, despite the centrality of place in these community initiatives, defining neighborhoods as they are experienced by residents has proven challenging. This paper demonstrates how a household survey can be used to ascertain residents’ views of the place they refer to as their neighborhood. The study uses data from the Making Connections (MC) target areas in 10 cities. A representative sample of households were asked the name of their neighborhoods and instructed on how to draw maps of their neighborhoods as they viewed them. GIS tools were used to uncover spaces within the MC target areas that residents included in their definitions of neighborhood as well as spaces that seemed to fall outside their collective definitions. The study revealed several overlapping areas that constituted resident-defined neighborhoods within most Making Connections target areas. The paper discusses the implications of this diversity of resident neighborhood perceptions for community change initiatives.

This research is part of the work that the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development participates in for the Annie Casey Foundation's Making Connections Initiative.

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Living Proof is the podcast series of the University at Buffalo School of Social Work. The purpose of this series is to engage practitioners and researchers in lifelong learning and to promote research to practice, practice to research.

Prof. Claudia Coulton, Co-Director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, was interviewed for episode number 37 of the podcast series, during which she discussed: the importance of context for child and family well-being, how social work practitioners, researchers, and students can use technology such as geographic information systems (GIS) and other analytic tools to understand social problems, improve service delivery, promote community and social development, to better understand and address place-based disparities.

To see GIS mapping of social well-being indicators being used for these purposes, see the Center's Northeast Ohio Community and Neighborhood Data for Organizing data base website. NEO CANDO, is a free and publicly accessible social and economic data system

A Janurary 20, 2010 Cleveland Scene article, "DISHONORABLE DISCHARGE: FirstEnergy asks to be excused for exceeding limits on mercury pollution in lake by DAMIAN GUEVARA," uses NEO CANDO Poverty Data in its discussion of the potential effect of First Energy's Lake Shore Power Plant's, Mercury pollution on nearby residents who supplement their food intake by fishing nearby in Lake Erie.

The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development's Associate Director for Community Information, Mike Schramm, was quoted in the Toronto Star's article, "13 neighbourhoods in need: It has been four years since the launch of an ambitious campaign to lift up Toronto's 13 most troubled neighbourhoods. Millions of dollars later, it's not clear what that effort has achieved. How does a city measure hope?" About a free, online, neighborhood-indicator database. This system will not only be used to track changes and to award millions of dollars in grants, but can be used by activists and non-profits, similar to the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences's own NEO CANDO system, here at Case Western Reserve University.

"Information in the hands of people can be very powerful," said Mike Schramm, of Neocando, an online database of neighbourhood [sic] indicators developed by the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

"But you have to have data that deals with neighbourhoods and you have to be in the business of democratizing information ... really getting it into the hands of those people who can actually act to make a change, from the mayor to the head of a non-profit that does community development, to a councillor for a ward."

Professor Robert L. Fischer is quoted in The Plain Dealer article, "Change How Kids Learn, Change the Future" by Brett Larkin.

The article is about Cuyahoga County's Universal Pre-Kindergarten Pilot administered by Invest in Children , a public-private partnership focused on young children and their families. Cuyahoga County is assisted by Starting Point, a nonprofit specializing in child care. Case Western Reserve University's Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development is the project evaluator. The numbers regarding the improvements of children assisted by the program come from the program evaluations, run by the Center.

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In The Center for Community Solutions's January 2010 news publication, Planning & Action, the article "Community Profile: University Heights: Diverse Residents, Beautiful Homes" includes NEO CANDO Median Home value data by city for a comparison of homes values across Cuyahoga County by city.

Mandel Student Provides a Gift of Memories

Keepsake books will appear as holiday gifts for 10 senior citizens in Wadsworth, Ohio. The gift is one filled with their memories, which for some is a way to preserve their past before it is lost to the ills of aging.

David Harris, a graduate student at Case Western Reserve University's Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, and a Master Student field placed with the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, and his longtime friend Joey Hanna from Wadsworth created The Living through Legacies Project with the Wadsworth Center for Older Adults, which allows for the creation of personal, timeless memoirs.

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On Monday Dec 7, Claudia Coulton, co-director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, gave testimony as she appeared before the Domestic Policy Subcommittee of the Congressional Oversight and Government Reform Committee, chaired by U.S. Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich, during which she suggested steps to ease to nation's foreclosure crisis. During the hearing Prof. Coulton referred to data the Center has gathered in Cleveland to track the housing crisis over the past decade.

Data from the Center's research was also quoted in this news segment on WOIO on News at Noon about this hearing, noting that, "In the last four years, there have been upwards of 47,000 foreclosure filings in Cuyahoga County alone." Prof. Coulton also appeared in a video segment related to foreclosures and the hearing on WOIO's 4 PM news - also available at the same link above.

At the request of the Center, WOIO - Fox 19 News also included a link suggesting with what the Center considers the most important information for individuals:

"Click HERE for free help. The phone number is 211 (from your cell phone) or 216-436-2000," which are connections to the HUD certified counselors and United Way's First Call for Help.

For more detailed information on the breadth and depth of the crisis see the Center's recent foreclosure-related reports:

Behind The Numbers Brief Number 8, Trends in ‘home purchase loan’ originations in Cuyahoga County and the City of Cleveland through the period 1995-2008

Beyond REO: Property Transfers at Extremely Distressed Prices in Cuyahoga County, 2005-2008.

Pathways to Foreclosure: A Longitudinal Study of Mortgage Loans, Cleveland and Cuyahoga County, 2005-2008.

Behind the Numbers Brief Number 6, Houses in transition: a report on properties owned by financial institutions and real estate organizations in Cuyahoga County, 2007.

Foreclosure and Beyond: A report on ownership and housing values following sheriff’s sales, Cleveland and Cuyahoga County, 2000-2007.

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From 12/6 to 12/8/2009, South Korean governmental officers of the Ministry for Health, Welfare and Family Affairs, Mr. Hwan Wi, Deputy Director and his two colleagues, a director (Dr. Keesung Noh) and a researcher of Korea Social Service Institute, Dr. Kwangho Jung (Professor, Seoul National University Seoul, Korea) visited to the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences at Case Western Reserve University in order to observe the welfare delivery system of the U.S. Their visit was hosted by Dr. Joseph White, Director of the Center for Policy Studies.

At CWRU, they discussed the social service system of the U.S. and South Korea at a seminar with CWRU faculty members including Dr. White, Dr. David Crampton, and Dr. David Hammack. Afterward, they visited to Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development.

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Behind the Numbers report shows much lower home purchase lending levels in 2008

The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development's November 2009 Behind the Numbers takes a closer look at trends in ‘home purchase loan’ originations in Cuyahoga County and the City of Cleveland through the period 1995-2008.

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In this Update:

All too often research is conducted in a way that is disconnected from the reality of life in communities, with findings often having little relevance to real-world program and policy decisions. With this publication, the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development highlights an example of how research and evaluation data have been effectively used over time in a major community initiative in the Cleveland region.

Drawing on a decade of transformative research done in partnership with Cuyahoga County's Office of Early Childhood/Invest in Children and its public/private set of collaborators, the report describes the experiences of this community initiative and concrete examples of how data have been used to inform practice and policy.

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2009 Nonprofit Management and Leadership Editors' Prize for Best Scholarly Paper Interview

David Renz, Ph.D., Professor and Director of the Midwest Center for Nonprofit Leadership at the University of Missouri-Kansas City is interviewed by Robert Fischer, Ph.D., an Associate Research Professor at the Mandel Center for Nonprofit Organizations and the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences regarding the practical implications of his research on nonprofit organizational effectiveness.

Prof. Renz is co-author and co-winner with Robert D. Herman, of The Nonprofit Management and Leadership journal 2009 NML Editors' Prize for Best Scholarly Paper, for their article “Advancing Nonprofit Organizational Effectiveness Research and Theory: Nine Theses.”

The Interview of David Renz by Robert Fischer may be viewed here.

"Transforming Civil Discourse and Neighborhood Identity through Action Research," a paper written by Mark Chupp, was recently selected by the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA) as the "Best Paper for 2008." Chupp, Assistant Professor at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, and Faculty Associate of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, presented the paper at ARNOVA's 2008 conference.

The announcement of this award was released during the 2009 conference and the notice of the award is listed in the ARNOVA Newsletter. WINTER 2010 VOLUME 38, NO. 3 on page number 3.

The economic epoch that has shaken the foundation of the American Dream and swallowed housing markets into a nationwide financial sinkhole has had several epicenters. One is the City of Cleveland.

Foreclosures and vacant properties in many neighborhoods have stock piled, values have plummeted, and numerous properties are being bought at below-market values of $10 thousand or less by real-estate speculators, most of whom are corporations that have no vested interest in planned and coordinated community development.

Now, Coulton and her colleagues are teaming up with the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland and The College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University in a multidisciplinary, multi-institutional partnership to provide a report to the nation, titled “Facing the Foreclosure Crisis in Greater Cleveland: What Happened and How Communities are Responding.” The new report is being funded in part by the Federal Reserve and Neighborhood Progress Incorporated. Coulton’s four previous reports were funded mainly by the The Cleveland Foundation and The George Gund Foundation, with additional support from Enterprise Foundation and Neighborhood Progress, Inc.

To see the full article from the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences's Insight and Action please to here.

To see Foreclosure related research papers from the Poverty Center please go here.

Beyond REO: Property Transfers at Extremely Distressed Prices in Cuyahoga County, 2005-2008.

Pathways to Foreclosure: A Longitudinal Study of Mortgage Loans, Cleveland and Cuyahoga County, 2005-2008.

Behind the Numbers Brief Number 6, Houses in transition: a report on properties owned by financial institutions and real estate organizations in Cuyahoga County, 2007.

Foreclosure and Beyond: A report on ownership and housing values following sheriff’s sales, Cleveland and Cuyahoga County, 2000-2007.

"New Evidence and Implications for Community Initiatives" by Claudia J. Coulton, Brett Theodos, Margery Austin Turner

Publication Date: November 02, 2009

The text below is an excerpt from the complete document at the Urban Institute. Read the full report in PDF format.

Abstract

Americans change residences frequently. Residential mobility can reflect positive changes in a family's circumstances or be a symptom of instability and insecurity. Mobility may also change neighborhoods as a whole. To shed light on these challenges, this report uses a unique survey conducted for the Making Connections initiative. The first component measures how mobility contributed to changes in neighborhoods' composition and characteristics. The second component identifies groups of households that reflect different reasons for moving or staying in place. The final component introduces five stylized models of neighborhood performance: each has implications for low-income families' well-being and for community-change efforts.

This research is part of the work that the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development participates in for the Annie Casey Foundation's Making Connections Initiative.

More papers that Claudia Coulton has authored for the Urban Institute can be viewed here.

New Thinking About Poverty in a Shrinking City: a presentation by Claudia Coulton, Co-Director, Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, September 2009.

Cleveland has lost more population and housing in the past 5 years than previous trends would have suggested. Yet it continues to be one of the poorest cities in America. This presentation documents the shifts in demographics and an economic downturn that suggest the need for new thinking about how to address poverty in a shrinking city.

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A Plain Dealer article by Brent Larkin, "Focus public investment on early-childhood intervention," on October 11, 2009, quotes Center Co-director Rob Fischer regarding Investment in Early Childhood in Cuyahoga County.

The articles main point can be summed up by this quote from the article from Arthur Rolnick and Rob Grunewald, officials at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis:

"We're quite certain that investing in early childhood education is more likely to create a vibrant economy that [sic] using public funds to lure a sports team by building a new stadium or attracting an automaker by providing tax breaks," Rolnick and Grunewald wrote in 2007. "The return on early childhood development programs that focus on at-risk families far exceeds the return on other projects that are funded as economic development."

The full article can be seen here.

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First year students Susan Ross and Jeong Woo Lee help survey vacant homes and lots in the City of East Cleveland, for their Macro and Policy Skills course. The students, accompanied by East Cleveland residents, surveyed the vacant properties and the results are helping city officials prioritize which buildings should be demolished. The students’ project helped the City of East Cleveland secure $2.2 million in federal funds from the Neighborhood Stabilization Program.

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In this Update:

In this Update:

In this Update:

The Cleveland Foundation and the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development recently began working together to show how the economic crisis is affecting Cuyahoga County. The result is an online display of data called “The Pulse.”

"The Pulse" succinctly uses four indicators to give its viewers a picture of the needs of Cuyahoga County residents:

• the number of people with food stamps benefits,
• the number of children with Medicaid benefits,
• mortgage foreclosures, (all from the Center's NEO CANDO system),
• and unemployment data from the Ohio Labor Market Information System.

These figures are updated on a monthly basis.

“The Pulse” was created in conjunction with the Cleveland Foundation's new Basic Needs Fund, which will help sustain local nonprofits that provide essentials like food, clothing, and shelter.

You can find “The Pulse” online at http://clevelandfoundation.org/grantmaking/Pulse.html.

The full NEO CANDO, Northeast Ohio Community and Neighborhood Data for Organizing resources can be found here.

You can find The Cleveland Foundation Pulse press release here.

Prof. Mark Chupp and Doctoral candidate Diwakar Vadapalli, will present "Limitations and Lessons in Place-Based Community Development: The CDC Movement in the US" in Monterrey, Mexico at the 16th, International Consortium for Social Development Symposium.

Abstract:
Community Development Corporations (CDCs) in the US are a vital organizational mechanism for revitalization of disadvantaged communities. throughout their evolution in history, CDCs followed the dominant framrwork of "place-based community development'.

This study examines the diverse roles of CDC's in community revitalization in the Cleveland metropolitan area, their limitations in addressing challenges that result in part from larger state and federal policies in spite of their adoption of sophisticated and modern organizational mechanisms and techniques.

Recommendations include: 1) adopting a broader social development framework for building community capitals and 2) adopting a flexible unit of analysis that can be applied beyond the confines of a "place-based community'. Community-based organization in other countries, as they design their strategies for revitalization or development, can draw lessons from the experience of CDC's from a major American city.

Michigan Radio, July 20, 2009

The City of Cleveland has a goal of rehabbing 150 vacant homes, demolishing 300, and preventing another 300 homes from going into foreclosure. It's all part of a program called Opportunity Homes. The program relies on data from Mike Schramm and the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development at Case Western Reserve University.

Read or listen to the WUOM 91.7, Ann Arbor, Michingan NPR affiliate interview here.

Cleveland Plain Dealer July 19, 2009

You can see a troubling new trend in the foreclosure crisis in a Cleveland Plain Dealer article by Sandra Livingston titled, "Bank 'walkaways' from foreclosed homes are a growing, troubling trend" here.

"Bank walkaways" are another troubling development in the foreclosure crisis, particularly in cities like Cleveland with weaker housing markets, say housing advocates and government officials. Where banks and Mortgage comanies choose to leave the house in legal limbo, rather than complete the foreclosure. Researchers at the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development at Case Western Reserve University are studying the issue.

Researcher Michael Schramm comments.

The Berea Children's Home and Family Services's Summer 2009 newsletter, Seeds of Hope, highlights The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development in the question-and-answer article, "Understanding Poverty: What Can Be Done To Help Children and Families?"

The Berea Children's Home and Family Services's site can be found here.

The Summer 2009 issue of the Seeds of Hope newsletter can be found here.

The Article with the Poverty Center starts on page 6 of the PDF version.

John Taylor, an urban planner from Indonesia, and José "Zay" Marcelo Zacchi, Executive Director of Overmundo Institute and a founder and a member of the Brazilian Public Security Forum Board of Directors, visited the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development.

Mr. Taylor is currently involved in facilitating data-driven decision-making in urban areas of Indonesia. Building bridges between policy establishment, political decision makers, and the population impacted by those decisions is at the core of Mr. Taylor efforts. The ‘Urban Observatory’, as he called it, will be a place to collect data from various sources and disseminate it in multiple formats such as tables and maps.

Mr. Taylor and Mr. Zacchi were at the Center for a three day exchange of ideas on democratizing data and assisting in local policy making. A video of their impressions of the Center and its work will be part of a documentary film that Mr. Taylor will be using to advocate for data-driven decision-making in Indonesia.

An overview of Mr. Taylor's presentation can be viewed, here. His bio can be found, on page ten, here.

Diwakar K. Vadapalli, Doctoral Research Fellow at the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, presented a paper in Carmona, Spain, April 22-24, at a research meeting titled, "Social Welfare and Cash Transfer Meeting," which was organized by both UNICEF and University College London, to discuss the role of social welfare services in improving cash transfer programs.

A communiqué released from the meeting is available here.

Mr. Vadapalli's paper is titled, "Barriers and challenges in accessing social transfers and role of social welfare services in improving targeting efficiency: a study of conditional cash transfers," and it was featured in the July edition of NASW News in the article, "Services Enhance Cash Programs: Information flow among the parties is vital to the success of cash transfer policies," by Paul R. Pace, that reports about this research meeting.

Mr. Vadapalli's paper will also be presented at the 2009 Symposium of the International Consortium for Social Development in Monerrey, Mexico on July 28th, 2009. It will appear in a special issue of the international journal Vulnerable Children and Youth Studies titled, "UNICEF Special Issue: Barriers and challenges in accessing social transfers and role of social welfare services in improving targeting efficiency: a study of conditional cash transfers by: D. Vadapalli."

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Family Homelessness in Cuyahoga County

A new Briefly Stated number 09-03, titled "Family Homelessness in Cuyahoga County" has been released. It summarizes research in a white paper by the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development regarding an analysis of the number of homeless families and "doubled up" families in Cuyahoga County.

The Briefly stated can be read or downloaded here.

The White paper, also titled "Family Homelessness in Cuyahoga County," can be read or downloaded here.

A brief radio article, on NPR affiliate WCPN, referencing this paper can be read or heard here.

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In this Update:

You are invited to watch a video on the university's YouTube channel featuring Marc A. Stefanski and Sharon Milligan on "The Impact of Housing on Financial Markets and Urban Families."

Stefanski is the chairman and CEO of Third Federal Savings and Loan; Milligan is associate dean for academic affairs at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, and Associate Director for Outreach and Education at the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development.

The discussion—which took place during spring semester—was sponsored by the Office of the President, Case Western Reserve University.

To view this video please click here.

Cleveland, Ohio City Council held a meeting with presidential campaign representative six days before the Ohio 2008 presidential Primary regarding the Foreclosure Crisis and to inform the candidates might be able to about it.

This meeting was called, "Cleveland: The Fighting Foreclosure and Abandonment Forum, A dialogue about solutions between the Presidential campaigns and one of America's hardest-hit communities... six days before the decisive Ohio primary" with the sponsorship and participation of numerous Cleveland leaders, agencies and community organizations and invited representatives of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development was represented at this meeting by our Associate Director for Community Information, Michael Schramm.

On Wednesday, February 27, 2008 there was a live Webcast called to view the recording of this video please go here.

Information on the Cleveland City council's Foreclosure Forum can be viewed here.

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NEO CANDO property data update

Lord knows...But what do we know about the effectiveness of faith-based programming?

Beginning with the Clinton Administration and greatly extended under George W. Bush, the federal government has expanded the role of faith-based providers in the delivery of a range of human services.

Since 2001, the Faith-Based and Community Initiative (FBCI) has aimed to give these organizations equal opportunity with secular and larger organizations to secure federal funding for the delivery of social services.

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Quality Matters - Assessing the quality of early care settings in Cuyahoga County

This document summarizes recent research which investigates the effects of County programs which promote increased capactiy and quality in the region's childcare.

Using data from 177 pre-school classrooms, this study was undertaken to assess the level of quality in regulated early care and education settings in and around Cleveland, Ohio.

The quality of care in settings serving young children is a crucial concern in policy and practice circles as we seek ways to promote child development. This study examined the structural and contextual factors associated with high quality care and was designed to inform a community-wide initiative focused on child well-being and school readiness.

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New Poverty Center report examines what happens to properties after sheriff's sale and REO ownership

Many properties that go into foreclosure eventually end up at a sheriff's auction, where they are usually purchased by the banks, mortgage companies, mortgage services, and government-sponsored enterprises involved in financing the foreclosed mortgage loan. These properties are referred to as "REO" (real-estate owned) properties. Between 2005 and 2008, there has been a drastic increase in REO properties being sold at extremely low prices—$10,000 and often less.

The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development has produced a report,
Beyond REO: Property Transfers at Extremely Distressed Prices in Cuyahoga County, 2005-2008, that takes a look at the trend of REO properties sold at $10,000 or less; the most frequent sellers and buyers of these properties in 2007 and 2008; time between property transactions; the price of properties in subsequent transactions; and limited information about the practices of some buyers and sellers of REO properties.

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Among its many functions, the Northeast Ohio Community and Neighborhood Data for Organizing (NEO CANDO) database allows users to extract data across geography and time to examine trends.

The second map in the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development’s Map Series illustrates changes in Food Stamp enrollment between July 2000 and July 2008.

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Sharon Milligan Presents on Poverty to the Young Presidents Organization as part of a panel that addressed Poverty in Cleveland.

The event was held at the Christian Hope Missionary Baptist Church in Cleveland on October 22, 2008.

Others joining Dr. Milligan on the panel that presented to the Young Presidents Organization were Joe Gaunter, Cuyahoga County Employment & Family Services; Reverend Bruce Goode, Christian Hope Missionary Baptist Church; and Judy Simpson, United Way of Greater Cleveland. The panel's moderator was Regina Brett from The Plain Dealer.

The handout providing an update about poverty statistics in Cleveland and Cuyahoga County was distributed to those who attended and is available here.

The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development's NEO CANDO community data resource is an invaluable tool for community development professionals and research.

Read about how two researchers, Fahui Wang and Richard Smith utilize NEO CANDO for policy evaluation in Evaluating Economic Development in Cleveland's Urban Neighborhoods.

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In this Update:

To sustain NEO CANDO as a free resource to the community, we are now requiring self-registration and login in to access the Social and Economic Data and Quick Profiles in NEO CANDO. We have been using this login successfully for the past 2 years on the Property Data section. If you have already registered to use the Property Data you do not need to self register again.

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These profiles summarize key data pertinent to the early childhood population in Cuyahoga County’s communities. This is provided as a reference tool that may be helpful in understanding community needs and existing services for children. A version of this profile was originally developed by the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development for Invest in Children. Invest in Children, administered by the Board of Cuyahoga County Commissioners, is a community-wide public/private partnership working together to help increase the development, funding, visibility, and impact of early childhood services in Cuyahoga County. The common goal of these partners is to make sure that all children have quality services available to them, which assist in their earliest developmental years and ensure they enter kindergarten healthy, happy, and ready to learn. Click here to view sources for indicators in the profiles.

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Data Sources Recently Updated:

Let us know how we are doing! Please take the NEO CANDO survey by clicking the following link:
http://neocando.case.edu/survey

There are also links to the survey on the NEO CANDO home page under "NEO CANDO features" and the "Questions and Comments" section on the left.

Your feedback is valuable to the improvement and maintenance of the system.

If you took the last survey, you can still take this one.

The survey will be available through July 31.

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Over the past few months the following data sources have been updated:
Social and Economic Data:

Tattered: Rampant Foreclosures Have Torn The Very Fabric Of The Region
By Dan Harkins

An article in the Cleveland Free times, Volume 15, Issue 62 Published July 9th, 2008, quotes poverty Center research in its detailed assessment of one neighborhood's experience with foreclosures and shrinkage.

"According to a study released late last month by the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development at Case, 'Even when they are compared with whites of similar income, [African Americans'] rates of receiving high-cost subprime loans are two to four times higher. Racial segregation and disparities in the loan products African Americans receive play in a highly significant spatial concentration of foreclosures that brings down surrounding property values and further fuels the foreclosure process.'

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New Poverty Center report examines circumstances most likely to lead a property to foreclosure

Foreclosure rates in Northeast Ohio have grown exponentially in recent years and present unprecedented challenges for communities, governments and households. Subprime lending has also increased markedly as a proportion of all mortgage loans originated in the region during this period and is widely believed to have played an important role in the current foreclosure crisis.

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Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities "Cityscapes" Series. Claudia J. Coulton, of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, interviewed Thomas J. Sugrue, a visiting fellow from the University of Pennsylvania, and author of "The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit" (1996), will present "Jim Crow's Last Stand: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Suburban North" 29:28 min.

View the Case Utube Video Here.

Kristen Mikelbank & Michael Schramm, presented a poster and a demo of NEO CANDO, the web-based social and property indicators data system, at The Kelvin Smith Library GIS Symposium, titled,

"The NEO CANDO Database: How it can be Used to Help Understand the Surrounding Environment"

Additional Authors: Tsui Chan and Claudia Coulton

Abstract is available here.

Download PDF of Poster

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Property data from the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development’s NEO CANDO serves as a primary tool in Neighborhood Progress, Inc’s (NPI) Strategic Investment Initiative. The SII land assembly team uses NEO CANDO data (including lists of blighted properties and parcel maps) to aid community development corporations (CDCs) in tracking effort and targeting neighborhoods for recovery projects, such as Slavic Village.

Some of the work by NPI is featured in the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy publication Transforming Community Development with Land Information Systems (Policy Focus Report) from March 2008.

Property transfer data through February 29, 2008 have been added to the parcel report in NEO CANDO.

NEO CANDO has transfer history back to January 1, 1976 for all parcels in Cuyahoga County.

Property transfer data through January 31, 2008 have been added to the parcel report in NEO CANDO.

NEO CANDO has transfer history back to January 1, 1976 for all parcels in Cuyahoga County.

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Public assistance data for January 2008 have been added to the Social and Economic Data report.

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The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development's NEO CANDO community data resource is an invaluable tool for community development professionals.

Read about how Rebecca Kodysh of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Cleveland uses NEO CANDO in
Demonstrating the need for community services.

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Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences Research Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Center for Urban Poverty & Community Development Rob Fischer, has been selected to write a commissioned paper for the upcoming White House Conference on Research Related to the Faith-Based and Community Initiative to be held in June 2008.

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Attendance and enrollment data for the 2006-2007 school year have been added to the Social and Economic report in NEO CANDO. These data are only available for the Cleveland School District.

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Property transfer data through December 31, 2007 have been added to the parcel report in NEO CANDO.

NEO CANDO has transfer history back to January 1, 1976 for all parcels in Cuyahoga County.

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Property transfer data through November 30, 2007 have been added to the parcel report in NEO CANDO.

NEO CANDO has transfer history back to January 1, 1976 for all parcels in Cuyahoga County.

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A new report from the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences at Case Western Reserve University addressing the foreclosure issue calls for refinancing loans or providing assistance to homeowners as an effort to maintain property values and prevent vandalism and deterioration to vacant structures.

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The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development's NEO CANDO community data resource is an invaluable tool for community development professionals.

Read about how Matt Russell of Center on Health Promotion at Case Western Reserve University uses NEO CANDO in
Providing Context to Research Findings Using Demographic Indicators.

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2006 juvenile delinquency data have been added to the Social and Economic Data report. These data are only available for Cuyahoga County.

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The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development's NEO CANDO community data resource is an invaluable tool for community development professionals.

Read about how Debra Peck-Baumgardner of Buckeye Area Development Corporation uses NEO CANDO in
Targeting Capital to Encourage Successful Home Ownership.

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Property transfer data through October 31, 2007 have been added to the parcel report in NEO CANDO.

NEO CANDO has transfer history back to January 1, 1976 for all parcels in Cuyahoga County.

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Public assistance data for October 2007 have been added to the Social and Economic Data report.

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The U.S. foreclosure crisis has earned international attention, with BBC news turning toward Mandel professor and Poverty Center director Claudia Coulton for some answers and analysis.

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The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development's NEO CANDO community data resource is an invaluable tool for community development professionals.

Read about Joy Brewington of Catalyst Cleveland use of NEO CANDO in Documenting Analyzing and Supporting School Improvement Efforts.

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Property transfer data through September 30, 2007 have been added to the parcel report in NEO CANDO.

NEO CANDO has transfer history back to January 1, 1976 for all parcels in Cuyahoga County.

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When a regional nonprofit organization wanted to invest in distressed neighborhoods and to improve services to minority populations, it turned to Case’s Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences to help with research methods, data collection, and analysis.

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2004 death data have been added for all 17 NEO CANDO counties to the Social and Economic Data report.

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Dr. Claudia Coulton, Lillian F. Harris Professor and Co-Director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, has been examining outcomes following welfare reform since soon after the reform legislation was signed into law.

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Second quarter (June 2007) United States Postal Service (USPS) data from HUD on addresses and vacant addresses have been added as to the Social and Economic report in NEO CANDO for all 17 counties.

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2006 child maltreatment data have been added to the Social and Economic Data report. These data are only available for Cuyahoga County.

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The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development's NEO CANDO community data resource is an invaluable tool for community development professionals.

Read about Frank Ford from Neighborhood Progress, Inc and Stacy Pugh from Slavic Village Development's use of NEO CANDO's property data in Creating Regionally Competitive Neighborhoods of Choice.

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Property transfer data through August 31, 2007 have been added to the parcel report in NEO CANDO.

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Michael Schramm, analyst/programmer at the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, travels to Pittsburgh to present the following at the 2007 Vacant Properties conference convened by the National Vacant Properties Campaign and the Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank:

2004 birth data have been added for all 17 NEO CANDO counties to the Social and Economic Data report.

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The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development's NEO CANDO community data resource is an invaluable tool for community development professionals.

Read about Jeff Sugalski and Burten Bell Carr's use of NEO CANDO's crime data in Evaluating Social Change, Developing Community.

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Public assistance data for July 2007 have been added to the Social and Economic Data report.

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January 1, 2000 through September 1, 2007

It is now 6 months later and the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, using its NEO CANDO database, has updated the results of the Behind the Numbers Brief Number 6, Houses in transition: a report on properties owned by financial institutions and real estate organizations in Cuyahoga County, 2007.

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Property transfer data through July 31, 2007 have been added to the parcel report in NEO CANDO.

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Behind the Numbers, BRIEF NO. 6, Titled "Houses in transition: A report on properties owned by financial institutions and real estate organizations in Cuyahoga County, 2007," discusses the rapid rise in foreclosure rates and housing abandonment in Cleveland and its surrounding suburbs.

This topic is garnering national attention and threatening to overwhelm the government agencies and community organizations that address the problem.

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The Poverty Center has released its May 2007 Briefly Stated, "Space to learn and grow: Early care and education capacity in Cuyahoga County." This document summarizes recent research which investigates the effects of County programs which promote increased capactiy and quality in the region's childcare.

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The quick profiles in NEO CANDO have been upgraded to include aggregate information on the 17 county NEO CANDO service area and the 8 county Cleveland-Akron CMSA.

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The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development creates maps for numerous research projects that may be of interest to a wider audience. With this map of community gardens, prepared by the Center's Kristen Mikelbank, in collaboration with Matthew E. Russell of the Center for Health Promotion Research for his paper Steps to a Healthier Cleveland: 2006 Community Garden Report, the Center debuts its mapping series. View the map of Cleveland's Community Garden Sites by Neighborhood here.

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Property transfer data through June 30, 2007 have been added to the parcel report in NEO CANDO.

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Business pattern data have been updated for 2004 and 2005 in the Social and Economic report in NEO CANDO. These data are available for all 17 NEO CANDO counties at the zip code tabulation area and the county levels.

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Population estimates from the Census Bureau for 2006 the have been added to the Social and Economic component of NEO CANDO. These data are only available at the Township (MCD) level and the county level.

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Parcel characteristics and tax billing information have been added to the parcel report for the 2006 tax year. These include updated market values from the 2006 reassessment. Also, variables and filters on parcels receiving the homestead exemption and 2.5% owner-occupied reduction have been added at the request of NEO CANDO users. Finally, lot shape has been updated after being missing for the 2004 and 2005 tax years.

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Crime Data for 2006 has been added to NEO CANDO.

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The quick profiles in NEO CANDO have been upgraded to include aggregate information on the 17 county NEO CANDO service area and the 8 county Cleveland-Akron CMSA.

Select “Regional” as your geographic level and then make either the 17 or 8 county selection. These profiles return side-by-side information on each county for comparison.

Select “County” as your geographic level after choosing a county. This profile will allow comparison between the chosen county with the aggregate values for both the 8 county Cleveland-Akron CMSA and the 17 county NEO CANDO service area.

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The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development's NEO CANDO community data resource is an invaluable tool for community development professionals.

Read about Terry Lenahan, use of NEO CANDO to predict and organize hunger solutions in "Documenting Hunger Trends in Greater Cleveland."

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Dr. Coulton presented research she prepared with Dr. Jill Korbin, director of Case's Schubert Center for Children.

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The Heights Community Congress (HCC) will host "Perception vs. Reality: How Do We Talk About Race, Class and Diversity In Our Own Community?" beginning at 7 p.m. on June 13 at John Hay High School, 2075 Stokes Blvd. Mark Chupp, a visiting assistant professor at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, is part of the panel. Free, open to the public. For more information, call the HCC at 216- 321-6775. Visit the Heights Congress site for more information.

Property transfer data through April 30, 2007 have been added

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As part of Invest in Children's Annual Meeting on June 4, 2007,
Cuyahoga County will share an update on the ongoing evaluation of its
programs. Since 2000 faculty and staff from the Center on Urban
Poverty and Community Development at MSASS have conducted a variety of studies related to the the condition of and services for children up to age six in Cuyahoga County. The evaluation team is led by Dr.
Claudia Coulton, Lillian F. Harris Professor, and Dr. Rob Fischer,
Research Associate Professor.

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Kristen Mikelbank presents an AECF study at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in San Francisco. The presentation was titled, "Residents" Perceptions of Neighborhood and the Implications for Community Change."

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Special study areas around University Circle have been added to the Social and Economic report.

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2005-2006 proficiency test data for the Cleveland Municipal School District have been added to the Social and Economic Data report.

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Public assistance data for April 2007 have been added to the Social and Economic Data report.

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Zip code tabulation areas have been added as a new geography to the Social and Economic report. These are a Census geography that are generalized area representations of U.S. Postal Service (USPS) ZIP Code service areas and are built from 2000 Census blocks.

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Kristen Mikelbank presented about the state of literacy and poverty in Greater Cleveland at The Literacy Cooperative's Instructors Learning Network (ILN) launching meeting.

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Claudia Coulton, Co-Director of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, is presenting the Catalog of Administrative Data Sources for Neighborhood Indicators at the IASSIST (International Association for Social Science Information Services & Technology) 2007 Conference in Montreal. This monograph discusses using neighborhood indicators to identify problems, plan programs, stimulate community activism, target investments, evaluate initiatives and otherwise inform the community about itself.

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Home Mortgage Disclosure data (HMDA) for 2005 have been added to NEO CANDO for all 17 counties. These data are available at the tract level and the county level for non Cuyahoga counties. In Cuyahoga County these data area available at the Neighborhood, DCFS Geodistrict, Cleveland Planning District, Township (MCD) or City/Village level.

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NEO CANDO, Northeast Ohio Community and Neighborhood Data for Organizing, is a free and publicly accessible social and economic data system of the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development, a research institute housed at Case Western Reserve University's Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences. NEO CANDO allows users to access data for the entire 17 county Northeast Ohio region, or for specific neighborhoods within Cleveland.

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The Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development's NEO CANDO community data resource is an invaluable tool for community development professionals.

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Property transfer data through March 31, 2007 have been added

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WCPN's Mhari Saito interviewed Mike Schramm, a programmer analyst at the Center on Urban Poverty, regarding an analysis that he did regarding the number of unrecorded sheriff's deeds in Cuyahoga County.

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Property transfer data through Feb 28, 2007 have been added

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Please take the NEO CANDO survey by clicking here. Your feedback is very important to us and will help us improve NEO CANDO!

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Public assistance data through January 2007 have been added to the Social and Economic Data report.

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More exporting options have been added to the Social and Economic Data report. By clicking “Download Menu” on the results screen, users can now export data into the following formats: CSV, Excel, DBASE/DBF(for GIS mapping) and a SAS dataset.

Also, new identifier fields have been added when exporting tract, block group, or block data. These fields correspond with the STFID field found in GIS datasets downloaded from ESRI’s Geography Network and should help users join NEO CANDO data easier to these GIS datasets. Also, because DBF files limit field names to 10 characters or less, a variable code to variable name lookup dbf can be downloaded from the “Download Menu” as well.

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December 14, 2006
Death data for 2003 from the Ohio Department of Health have been added to the Social and Economic Report.

December 12, 2006
Business Pattern data have been added as a new subject category in the Social and Economic Data report in NEO CANDO. These data are only available at the Zip Code Tabulation Area and County geographic levels.

County and Zip Business Patterns provide data on business establishments and employment by industry and establishment size. The information is derived from the Standard Statistical Establishment List, a file of all known companies maintained by the U.S. Census Bureau. The Bureau obtains data for the list from its own programs as well as administrative files from the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Business Patterns data cover most of the country's economic activity, but exclude data on the self-employed and most government workers.

The data are currently available for 1998-2003.

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Presents "Building upon the work of others: The Cleveland Community Building Initiative Experience" to the Central Neighborhood Committee, at The Sisters of Charity Foundation of Cleveland October 17, 2006

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NEO CANDO expanded in depth and breadth, now including 17 northeast Ohio counties and data down to the parcel level.

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Cuyahoga County Early Childhood Initiative Evaluation: Phase II Final Report

Introduction:

Since mid-1999, a bold initiative has been underway in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, to improve the well-being of the youngest members of the greater Cleveland community. A community-wide initiative targeting children from birth through age five and their families was launched in July 1999, and in the following 5 years demonstrated substantial success in developing a universal and comprehensive approach for supporting families with young children.

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Cuyahoga County Early Childhood Initiative Evaluation: Phase I Final Report

Synopsis:

In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, a community-wide, multifaceted initiative directed at children from birth through age 5 has been forged to meet the need for a universal and comprehensive approach for supporting all families with young children.

In its first three years (July 1999 - June 2002), the Early Childhood Initiative (ECI) was launched by a broad-based coalition of public and private partners brought together by County government. The programs of the ECI have been woven into the fabric of local services and have met their target goals of numbers of clients served.

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Cuyahoga County Early Childhood Initiative Evaluation and Research Project Interim Report
November 2001

Synopsis:

Investing in the well-being of its youngest children has become a top priority in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. As a result of a community-wide, multifaceted three-year initiative directed at children from birth to age 5 and the individuals who care for these children, an understanding about the critical importance of the early childhood years has been created at the highest levels of public and civic leadership in Cuyahoga County. The political will has been forged to meet the need for a universal and comprehensive approach for supporting families and young children.

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