Community Issues Management

Aligning Community Resources with People and Place

A Community Convening Tool For Making More Informed Decisions

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Mission

The Community issues Management (CIM) Collaborative provides a process-focused convening space for engaging regional, state and national intermediaries in identifying, analyzing and prioritizing issues that impact their community.

Background

While parts of America are prospering and growing, far too many regions, communities, families and children are struggling.  In many regions, human services, health care, education, local business, and even public facilities are eroding at accelerating rates. Issues of distance and isolation, and the negative effects of persistent poverty impact a variety of public policies and programs across all sectors.

Place-committed, community-serving intermediaries bring a heritage of grounded connections to the people and institutions at the local and regional level.  Outside experts and a multiplicity of programs are not a substitute for the trusted local institution, deeply rooted within its community.

Goal

The goal of CIM is to better align community resources with people and place at all levels of governance. The CIM framework accommodates a patchwork quilt approach of acquiring, linking and organizing numerous datasets within an Internet-based geographic information system (GIS).  The CIM system serves as the engine for effectively engaging intermediaries in an open, transparent, and collaborative space. Utilizing the place-based knowledge of these intermediaries CIM’s existing systems framing will ultimately help inform policy makers as to allocation of resources by identifying gaps and overlap in service provision and better aligning funding with state, regional and local needs.

What is CIM?

The Community Issues Management (CIM) Collaborative provides a mechanism for engaging stakeholders in identifying, analyzing and prioritizing issues that impact their community and region. This collaboration is comprised of an engaged learning community and unique Internet-based decision support tools. These tools include a suite of applications that enable decision makers to conduct place-based analyses and generate maps and dynamic reports,

The CIM system is built within a national-level Internet-based GIS framework that enables intermediaries across the country to add community-specific data and overlay their data with state and national datasets. The collaboration involves integrating health and human services data with other federal, state and local data (i.e., socio-economic, demographic, jurisdictional, political, environmental, and infrastructure data) to: (1) geographically visualize community, regional, and national-level data via the Internet; (2) integrate new spatial data and overlay these data to conduct location-specific analyses; and (3) generate maps, dynamic reports, and “what if” scenarios that utilize the integrated nature of these information systems.

Definition – Issues Management

In the private sector the term “Issues Management” has been defined as, “the process used to align organization activities and stakeholder expectations.” 

In business, Issue Management refers to the discipline and process of managing business issues and usually implies using technology to electronically automate the process. Electronic issue management has gathered steam as a business and technology movement in recent years as mid-sized and large businesses have realized the advantage of implementing systems to manage, document, and track work. (Reference: Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issue_management).

The term “Community Issues Management” (CIM) is defined as the Deliberation Technology process used to align community resources with people and place. 

Which organizations can be involved?

The Community Issues Management Collaborative provides an open convening space for engaging public and nonprofit sector organizations around issues that impact their regional, state or national community. This open space is not dominated by any one organization or institution.  Rather, CIM is facilitated by RUPRI’s Community Information Resource Center to foster transorganizational collaboration.  The contribution of each organization’s piece of the data puzzle contributes to telling a better story about people, place and integrated service provision. Data framed around issues in a visualization context better engages policy makers in making wiser public choices.

A Collaborative Partner can:

• Integrate community datasets into the CIM framework and overlay your data with over 500 existing datasets that currently reside in CIM (for example, health, human service, socio-economic, demographic, jurisdictional, environmental, and infrastructure data)

• Direct the development and implementation of customized dynamic reports and spatial analysis tools for a community

• Have full access to dynamic reports and tools developed by other Collaborative Partners and have the option of incorporating what was developed in another communities into a region

• Enable other partners in a region to contribute their organizations’ pieces of the data puzzle to telling a quantifiable story about people, place and community sustainability

• Serve as a community convener and enable stakeholders to focus on deliberation and process rather than data and technology

• Provides an objective framework for determining if an agency’s programs or a funder’s investments are making a difference in a community

How can stakeholders use CIM for local decision making?

Community decision makers may identify gaps in service provision and barriers to providing services; and policy makers could assess the impact of the allocation of resources on the quality, access, and use of services. This detection permits an assessment of the quality of services available to vulnerable populations, while informing the allocation of community resources.   For example, a user can select health data or census data on age, race, and income and overlay it with local data, such as service provider locations and their service delivery areas to determine the level and impact of gaps or overlap in provision.  The long term goal of a Community Issues Management collaborative is to more effectively align federal and state funds to where the need is greatest.

The Community Issues Management System:

• Enables community intermediaries to use the Intranet portal to make informed internal organizational decisions regarding community issues, access to services, regional impact, allocation of resources, spatial equity, etc.

• Provides a publicly accessible Internet portal for educating and mobilizing change agents and the broader community around specific priority issues, proposed strategies and measures of community impact.

• Establishes data sharing arrangements for ongoing and up-to-date access to national, state and local datasets.

How can stakeholders use CIM to inform national public policy and realign funding flows to more accurately reflect local needs?

Quite often, federal and state funds flow to localities under one-size fits all funding requirements, even when there is no-one size community.  This provides an understandable level of efficiency to funding allocation.  The long term goal of CIM, however, is to more effectively align federal and state funds to where the need is greatest, in a manner that addresses a community’s real needs, not their needs as perceived at the national level.  

CIM has been scaled to accommodate a national platform for engaging public and nonprofit organizations around a more comprehensive understanding of their community and region.  CIM collaborators will integrate their regional health and human service data with regional economic, education, transportation and even environmental data, for the first time in many of these localities.  These local characteristics will then be integrated with over 500 national data sets available in the CIRC data warehouse in order to understand the local community story in a national context.

Collaborators are participants in a CIM learning community.  The contribution of each organization’s piece of the data puzzle to the CIM learning community contributes to telling a quantifiable story about people, place and integrated health and human service provision. This collaboration will weave the local stories into a national picture, with the goal of having national policy decisions driven by fully informed local level intermediaries.  Utilizing CIM outcome tools, regional intermediaries may begin to understand the interconnectedness of all facets of their community characteristics and the impact of their local decisions and be able to tell their rich story to policymakers. 

How is CIM relevant to community-based decision making?

Historically, community-based decision making and public policy analysis have most often been conducted in a sector-specific, rather than integrated fashion, due to the nature of agency-mandated information systems architecture. Today, nonprofit and public sector organizations are increasingly using geographic information technologies to examine the place-based impacts of public policies, and many state and federal agencies have established Internet-based data warehouses or geospatial portals for accessing data. However, most of these initiatives focus only on sector data access and download, rather than decision support.  Furthermore, most organizations lack the time, expertise or technological infrastructure required to: (1) download data from warehouses, (2) import this data into an information system, and (3) develop new interfaces for conducting “what if” scenario analyses.

Community Issues Management transcends agency-specific data repositories and warehouses and enables decision makers to focus on the deliberation process of aligning community resources with people and place.

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