Building Better Community Service Information

Report and Prospectus

Chicago MidSouth Community Resource Directory Project December 2005

Building Better Community Service Information

Intr oduction
This report reviews the ndings of our Chicago MidSouth Community Resource Directory Project and envisions how better community service information could be provided to Chicagos residents and to Americans in similar settings around the nation. Several strategies for pursuing this objective are summarized in the hope of stimulating interest, feedback, and new participation in moving this work ahead. Over the past three years, the MacArthur Foundation funded several University of Chicago projects that assessed the impact of Chicagos public housing transformation on the provision of social services. This project focused initially on compiling community resource and service information in order to make it available to relocating public housing residents, and their case managers, in the citys MidSouth area. The project has delivered rich listings of community services in hard copy and electronic media. In this Internet age, many Americans can access information on books, clothing, furniture, and other products on a personal computer in a matter of seconds. After comparison shopping, a consumer can make a choice, validate payment arrangements, select a shipping method, place the order, and receive a receipt. In many places, it is increasingly possible to use this same technology to secure restaurant, travel and hotel reservations, and even to schedule appointments at upscale, local hair cutting salons. What happens, though, when we want help from resources in our communities like social service centers, medical clinics, houses of worship, schools, and local associations? We discover that we are supported by a complex array of service systems in which relevant information is frequently incomplete, inaccurate, or outdated. Finding help whether in person, by telephone, or with
Author Mark H. Neuffer A.M., School of Social Service Administration University of Chicago [email protected] [email protected] Acknowledgments The author wishes to thank the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which funded this project. Work was conducted at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration and the Chapin Hall Center for Children over the period 2003-2005. Particular thanks are extended to Edward F. Lawlor and Mark E. Courtney for their generous support and to Jocelyn W. McClelland for her devoted and inspired effort in making the Chicago MidSouth Community Resource Directory a reality.

a computer turns out to be complicated and time-consuming. Too often, we need help nding help.

Building Better Community Service Information

Design Objectives
Figure 1 lists ve project design objectives, of which the rst two were paramount: to catalog all community service information relevant to relocating public housing residents, and to present it in a manner directly useful to them as service consumers. We also sought insight into the needs of other information users such as service providers, service system managers, government agencies, and
Figure 1: MidSouth Community Resource Directory
Service Provider
Consumer Actionability Lower

researchers. Finally, while providing better information in the short term, we also sought to determine how better community service information could be built in the future.

Design Objectives
1. Catalog all relevant community services 2. Take a service consumer perspective 3. Consider the needs of other information users 4. Provide better service information now 5. Identify ways of providing better service information in the future

Mission Organization Operations Revenues & Expenses

Provider Information

Programs Objectives Populations Served General Information

Program Information

We grouped community resource information into three logical layers (Figure 1). The service provider tier at the top contains information

Service Offerings Detailed Information Eligibility Criteria Service Sites & Contacts Days & Hours Open
Service Information

describing institutional mission, organization, and operations. Program information in the middle tier offers general descriptive material about program offerings, objectives, and
Higher

Service Access Service Availability Client Choice Service Referral Documentation

Service Delivery Service Detail Client Detail Practitioner Detail Service Provider Detail

populations served. Our primary concern was with the service information in the bottom tier, because

this is where the informations relevance is greatest to the consumer seeking help. Within this layer, the Service Offerings cluster details specic services, their locations, contact personnel, eligibility requirements, and days and hours of operation. This information is the most consumer-actionable that is, it equips the consumer with sufcient detail to make an informed choice of services and to contact suitable providers in the community.
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Building Better Community Service Information

As the service process unfolds, interaction between the consumer and service provider personnel, culminating in a referral, generates the information in the Service Access cluster in the diagram. The particulars of the service transaction, shown in the Service Delivery box, are then documented. Both of these information clusters are outside the immediate scope of developing a service directory, but it was essential to visualize the entire process as we prepared to develop a portion of it in robust detail.

Developing the Dir ectory

As the project was launched, we surveyed the published and computerized information that could serve as the Resource Directorys foundation. After it became apparent that no single source was adequate, a combination of multiple sources was then considered. We found that information about providers and services in Chicagos multi-system network is housed in the various state, county, city,
Table 1: Developing the MidSouth Community Resource Directory
Challenges
Provider-level information widely fragmented and out of date Organizations reluctant to share program and service information

and community institutions that provide, fund, or regulate the services. As a result, information is widely dispersed, and there is no blueprint to assemble it. It was also discovered that the caches of information throughout this constellation are frequently decient in quality and out of date. Even if such material could be integrated, it would be unreliable. As noted in Table 1, we responded to

Responses

Use Internet Yellow Pages to snapshot

provider information across the community

Team up with recognized community

organizations

Make extensive provider contact at

community functions and in smaller meetings

Consumer-actionable service information generally not available

Document projects information needs

simply, explicitly, and widely

this challenge by collecting providerlevel information from the Internet Yellow Pages (IYP). Because IYP data is generated from business telephone listings, and because almost all businesses have telephones, the IYP data enabled us to take a communitywide snapshot of providers across all the service systems. The picture also

Make intensive, ongoing contact with

service provider personnel to gather and validate information

No standard framework to dene organizations, services, and populations Variable, and generally low, use of information technology

Use nationally-recognized* AIRS/

InfoLine Taxonomy of Human Services to categorize providers, services and populations

Use manual and computerized vehicles

for collecting, processing, and publishing information

*The AIRS taxonomy is used by 211 telephone referral services across the United States.

Building Better Community Service Information

included organizations like churches and associations that function outside the boundaries of such systems. When we applied appropriate quality controls, the IYP information provided a foundation of comparatively current provider addresses, telephones, fax numbers, e-mail addresses, and web sites. The next step was adding more detailed information to this foundation. An entre to the community was provided by several local organizations that sponsored forums where we explained the purpose and value of our work. Extensive contact was then needed to motivate service providers to transform general program-level information to the ner level of detail required for it to be useful to service consumers. The project team distributed clear and simple documentation on how this could most efciently be undertaken, and maintained ongoing contact with provider personnel until the necessary data was gathered and validated. The difculty of this process was steeply increased by the lack of generally-accepted standards in Chicago for dening the diverse types of provider organizations, services, and populations. Without clear, consistent, and specic denitions of terms like homeless services, youth development (or even youth) the practical use of the service directory would be very limited. Accordingly, we adopted the AIRS/InfoLine Taxonomy of Human Services that is now widely used by Information and Referral organizations and 211 telephone referral services across the United States. Service providers varied widely in the extent and sophistication of their use of information technology, with a signicant fraction lagging well behind the computing, networking, and Internet standards of commercial and government sector organizations. Accordingly, we used every medium at our disposal, including direct contact, US mail, telephone, fax, electronic mail, and electronic forms, to communicate and exchange information with the service providers. The breadth of the communications spectrum suggested that the Resource Directory, once compiled, would have to be published in a variety of media ranging from hard copy to the Internet; no single medium would sufce.

Building Better Community Service Information

Pr oject Findings
Table 2: Snapshot of MidSouth Service Providers
Type
Religious Health Services Education Associations/CBOs Social Services

As project data was compiled (Table 2) the

Pct.
9.8% 5.6% 3.5% 2.3% 1.8%

No.
245 242 207 205 171

Pct.
17.6% 17.4% 14.9% 14.8% 12.3%

Type
Government Ofces Arts and Cultural Parks & Recreation Child Care Employment

No.
136 78 48 32 25

scope and diversity of MidSouth service providers became apparent. Indeed, harvesting information from the Internet Yellow Pages had revealed a greater number and variety of potential resources than sources within the traditional service constellations. As we lled the project database with service data, the picture became even more

interesting. The MidSouth service environment, we found, is characterized by diversity: many providers supply different kinds of services to various types of consumers. If the Resource Directory proposed to depict community services accurately, data collection would have to be extensive. Any approach focusing on particular provider types, services, or populations would not reveal the full span and depth of community resources. The service picture was so diverse that assumptions about what kinds of services would be offered by a particular provider type were abandoned in favor of on-the-ground investigation. Figure 2 highlights this diversity. Eight different provider types on the left of the diagram offer a total of 35 after-school programs. Conversely, a single organizational type in this example, religious organizations offers ten different kinds of services in addition to the mainstream offering of worship services.
Parks Arts and Culture Community Organizations Recreation and Sports

Figure 2 Many MidSouth Service Providers Offer Diverse Services

Many Service Provider Types Offer 35 After School Programs
Social Services Child Care Education

Religious Organizations Provide Many Types of Services

Social Services Educational Family and Children Community Services Recreation and Sports Arts and Culture Health Care Mental Health Employment Housing and Utilities

Building Better Community Service Information

Pr oject Reflections
Canvassing the community for service data produced surprises as well. One church had housed a charter school for several years, but with its tenant now departed for permanent quarters, the church had extensive facilities available for instruction and recreation. Another organization with frequent free access to events like airplane rides and ight lessons realized that these could be more widely enjoyed by the community if given a higher prole. A national advocacy organization with state headquarters in the Chicago Loop provides nancial counseling services at a landmark MidSouth bank an inexpensive
Table 3: Our Experience at a Glance
Positives
Pioneered technique for fast scanning of community resources Identied exact locations of services in the community Supported information needs of consumers, case managers Identied needs of wider audiences

and important benet of which many area

Negatives

residents were unaware. As data gathering proceeded, the boundaries of the word service continued to expand, and this was as much a revelation to the providers as it was to the project team. As we reected on the project (Table 3) we were grateful to have produced good-quality community resource information of a caliber not

Required long development time Demanded intensive involvement of participants Provided service information for only 20% of prospective providers One-time effort

previously enjoyed. The Internet Yellow Pages data provided an excellent snapshot of both commercial and noncommercial community resources. We were condent that the Resource Directory, by providing detailed service information for specic sites, would be highly actionable by consumers and case managers in the near future. It was hoped that wider audiences, such as planners in city and state agencies, would realize that only service-level data provides a fully-detailed picture of a communitys assets. Our experience also produced several sobering insights. It took much longer to deliver the rst service listing (about 12 months) than originally planned, and the associated effort was much greater. After an initial mailing of over 1,200 pieces, extensive outreach was conducted in conjunction with our partner organizations in the community. Hundreds of telephone calls, fax transmissions, and e-mails were exchanged in three successive waves over fteen months. With the systems we developed, the same process could be conducted far more efciently and quickly today. However, it would still be a labor intensive effort. More signicantly, only 20 percent of the providers we targeted and mailed had actually participated in the survey. Despite the effort and time expended, many of the communitys assets had not been brought into the sharp focus we believe to be essential. Finally, the project was a one-time event, and when it was concluded there was no mechanism for it to take on a life of its own and become self-sustaining.
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Building Better Community Service Information

Curr ent Chicago Initiatives

Over the course of the project we encountered many other organizations engaged in some aspect of cataloging, mapping, or surveying community resources and services (Table 4). At rst glance, the differences between the projects seem to overshadow the similarities. Varied geographies are under study, ranging from single communities to multiple cities in several states. The investigations vary in scope from specic clusters of organizations and services to all-inclusive surveys such as our projects. The audiences served by the different initiatives included service consumers, community planners, social workers supporting a hospitals emergency room patients, government analysts, and community school students and their parents.
Table 4: Other Resource-Related Initiatives in Chicago
Community Organizations Quad Communities Development Corporation Educational Institutions Brown University (project in Chicago) Donohue Elementary School Northwestern University University of Chicago (multiple departments) University of Illinois at Chicago Government Agencies Chicago Department of Human Services Chicago Housing Authority Chicago Public Schools Illinois Department of Child and Family Services Hospitals University of Chicago Hospital--Family Medicine University of Chicago Hospital--Emergency Room Not-for-Prot Organizations Community Resource Network One Economy Corporation (multiple projects) Research Centers and Planning Organizations Chapin Hall Center for Children (multiple projects) Metro Chicago Information Center (MCIC) Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission (NIPC)

The differences are nowhere more apparent than in the use of technology. Some projects are using pencil and paper surveys; others, hand-held data collection devices; still others, databases and geographic information systems.The projects are being pursued independently, so no provision has been made for the systematic sharing of knowledge, experience, or data. In the broader picture, the similarities between the projects ultimately are more telling. The importance of collecting service-level as well as provider- and program-level data has been acknowledged. All projects are seeking ways to more completely involve provider organizations and to secure information of better quality. We have also heard a desire voiced to have projects extend beyond one-time efforts to an ongoing process that continuously generates goodquality information. In short, many people are addressing the right issues and asking the right questions. There is great promise in this fact.

Points of Comparison
Differences Information Technologies Geographic Scope Scope of Providers Scope of Services Target Audience/Users Similarities Addressing the Right Issues: Better Data Gathering Service Focus Better Provider Participation Improved Information Quality Sustainable Information

Building Better Community Service Information Exchangeability Quality Sustainability Technology

Four Critical Success Factors

What would be required for high-quality service information to become a reality in Chicago? It is tempting to imagine that information technology is the silver bullet solution for many of the problems our project identied. And it is indeed true that information technology has not been used with notable effectiveness to communicate about Chicagos resources and services. Wouldnt a major technology ramp-up be the answer?
Table 5: Four Critical Success Factors of a Service Information System
Quality The sum of all characteristics of content that make the information usable Exchangeability The capacity to exchange information with full support of quality standards Technology Information technology for storing, processing, and exchanging information with full support of quality and exchangeability standards Sustainability A steady state in which the ongoing renewal of exchangeable, good-quality information is assured by the action of Business Drivers Accuracy Completeness Currency Level of Detail

We think that technology alone is not the answer. As earlier suggested, the core challenge lies in the complexity of systems and providers that serve the citys residents. Up to this point, most existing information delivery methods have only mirrored this complexity. In consequence, information is scattered across the service constellations and is expressed without the benet of common denitions to describe providers, services, and recipient populations. A successful information system must cut a laserstraight line across complex systems and deliver its message swiftly and simply to the consumer. To accomplish this, we believe, four critical success factors must be satised (Table 5).
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Documented standards for identifying organization, service, and population types Inter-standard connectivity Documented standards for dening and exchanging data Adheres to any technical conventions for information processing negotiated by system participants

Business Drivers Bear compellingly on providers nancial, professional, or operations standing and effectiveness Require the creation and maintenance of high-quality information Require adherence to standards that are required for exchanging information with external organizations Foster innovation in the use of information technologies that support primary system objectives; discourages unwarranted, low-return experimentation Reward good participation and penalize poor performance in the service system

Examples of Business Drivers

Business Driver
Federal Income Tax Reporting (Form 990) Service Payment (Invoices, transaction records)

Stakes
Tax-exempt status Penalties for late submission, errors, and omissions Revenue

Factor..Level of Support
Quality .................... Strong Exchangeability ....... Strong Technology ............. Strong Quality .................... Strong Exchangeability ....... Moderate - Strong Technology ............. Moderate

Building Better Community Service Information

The factor of quality involves every aspect of the informations suitability for use. This may seem self-evident, but we have encountered no resource information system that meets the four structural criteria of accuracy, completeness, currency, and level of detail. These criteria are common-sense conventions that should be dictated by the nature and use of the information. For example, programlevel revenue data would be considered current by an outside observer if it reected the most recent and available provider submission of the federal Form 990 return. By contrast, service site data must track the more frequent and unscheduled programmatic changes that occur throughout the year to be considered current by service consumers. The second factor of exchangeability is premised on the possibility of exchanging information between different providers and systems despite variations of denition and language. The expectation is not that everybody will settle on a single taxonomy but, rather, that they will adhere to at least one of several possible conventions for describing the actors, actions, and recipients of the service process. If providers meet this requirement, the service system software can provide inter-standard connectivity: that is, it can translate between different denitional standards. This will make crosssystem information sharing and comparisons possible, and it ensures the consistency of information provided to the service consumer. The technology factor does not endorse any specic conguration of hardware or software. Rather, technical components should be selected on the basis of how effectively they support the quality and exchangeability standards, on the cost/benet of technology investment, and on any accepted performance standards. Sustainability is a steady state in which the ongoing renewal of exchangeable, good-quality information is assured. Our project found that voluntary participation by service providers is not rigorous and complete enough to sustain good information. We think that a successful service information system must incorporate business drivers that provide compelling nancial, professional, and operational incentives for organizations to produce sustainable information. Table 5 provides two examples of business drivers. Annual submission of the Form 990 is a very powerful quality driver because signicant penalties attach to errors and omissions. Organizations seek to follow standards of content and language rigorously in order to ensure the most benecial result of the information exchange. The use of suitable information technology is being driven by the requirement that the not-for-prot sector phase in electronic ling. Service payment is a second example of a business driver. Organizations that produce accurate service transaction data in formats

Building Better Community Service Information

required by their funders are better positioned to be paid correctly and in a timely manner, and are more prepared to substantiate their claims in the event of a dispute. Note that the drivers do not guarantee good information, but they provide a high degree of leverage. They are also specic: the drivers that produce good nancial information do not generate high-quality service information. If Chicago is to have good service information, the business drivers that foster it will have to be identied and incorporated in service business models. It will take imagination to construct a system of incentives for many types of service providers. Even more creativity will be required to induce service consumers to participate thoughtfully in detailed customer feedback surveys. It will be still more challenging to make participation attractive to, and mission-compatible with, organizations like churches and fraternal associations that are generally considered to be outside of mainstream service systems. However, these challenges will have to be successfully met if good community service information is to be made available and sustained.

Moving Forwar d
Table 6 displays three general frameworks for meeting the challenges and opportunities raised in this discussion. While focusing on different areas of the service domain, all three are designed to demonstrate ways of sustaining better service information and to set the stage for subsequent projects. This strategy recognizes that there will be no single answer to all information needs, and that progress will be evolutionary through multiple phases. The rst framework (Chicago Service Information Collaborative) focuses on the City of Chicago and its residents as its primary customers. Its principal intention is to coordinate the activity of Chicagos multiple resource initiatives in order to produce a combined positive effect that is greater than the sum of its parts. A collaborative effort would enable participants to share data, methods, and technology know-how, thereby reducing redundancy and maximizing the use of each projects funding. Ideally, the City of Chicago would assume a central role in fostering and funding the development of a centralized service information system staffed by Information and Referral specialists. This system would be a crucial collection and distribution point for service information, but it would coexist and exchange information with other systems operated at county, state, and federal levels. Framework 2, the Public Agency Information Center, takes a large public agency, its delegate agencies, and its service consumers as the customers. This approach would demonstrate how a service information center could be built around one institutional service hub as a starting point. A rigorous
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Building Better Community Service Information

Framework 1

y Cit
Preliminary Analysis and Planning

Foc

us

Chicago Service Information Collaborative Framework 2 Public Agency Service Information Center Framework 3 Community Resource Tool Kit Propagation To Other Systems and Organizations

Agency Focus

Co

mm

uni

ty

Foc

analysis would ensure that the agency identied its information needs in detail, for both immediate and longer-term applications. The analysis would include plans not only for service information, but for other information, such as utilization. In conjunction with this, the agency would develop and test a business model equipped with the necessary business drivers to foster ongoing production of sustainable, good-quality information by key project participants. The project would be geared to produce an operational system and also a model that could be further developed by other agencies with like interests and needs. A dened Chicago community or a targeted set of wards would be the customer of Framework 3, the Community Resource Tool Kit. This project would initially focus on rening the tools and technologies of the MidSouth Resource Directory and
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us

Table 6: Three Project Frameworks for Moving Forward

Framework 1: Chicago Service Information Collaborative Coordinate the activity of multiple resource initiatives in Chicago Aims Provide forum for organizations gathering resource and service information Leverage data and methods of similar projects Dene information model for a broad spectrum of users including service consumers, service providers, funders, and regulators Share knowledge and experience concerning information technologies Publish high-value resource and service information to benet the city and the community Goals Provide a more unied and collaborative avenue for Chicagos various resource initiatives Dene strategic directions that provide the greatest common benet Identify strategic solutions with great common benet (such as an Information and Referral resource in Chicago).

Framework 2: Public Agency Service Information Center Guide a large public agency either contemplating or conducting a resource cataloguing initiative Aims Provide a methodology that allows the agency to identify and prioritize its information needs in both demand-side and supply-side information for the short-run and long-term Dene, develop, and implement a business model that drives the agency, delegate organizations, and service consumers to supply information to a service information center on an ongoing basis Guide the agency in acquiring and developing suitable information technologies to support the project Goals Develop and demonstrate a model of sustainable information that benets the agency, its service delegates, its service consumers, and other audiences Develop a plan for expanding and cultivating this model at other public agencies

Framework 3: Community Resource Tool Kit Guide a Chicago community involved in cataloguing community resources Aims Build a turnkey version of the current MidSouth Community Resource Database designed for easy use by community organizations Supply the Resource Tool Kit with frameworks like the AIRS/InfoLine Taxonomy of Human Services to categorize providers, services and populations Supply the Resource Tool Kit with high-quality Internet Yellow Pages data to start the resource mapping process Supply the Resource Tool Kit with a simple, powerful, and inexpensive mapping program to map resources, services, and other community points of interest Goals Demonstrate a high-impact, low-cost set of tools to catalog community resources Demonstrate how sustainable information can benet the community and its residents Develop a plan for expanding and cultivating this model in other communities

Building Better Community Service Information

packaging them as a turnkey system that could be easily used by non-technical personnel. Once the Tool Kit was developed, it would be installed in one or more appropriate community-based organizations. The Tool Kit would be provided with a database already populated by appropriate Internet Yellow Pages data so that community resource surveying could commence immediately. It would include applications to assist personnel in coding organizations, services, and populations, using widely-used coding schemes such as SIC, NAICS, and AIRS/InfoLine. User-friendly software applications would be provided for data entry, inquiries, and reporting. Data would be exchangeable with a simple mapping program included with the Tool Kit. As with the other project frameworks, the assumption is that this model and the improvements upon it would be made available for other organizations embarking on similar work.

Concluding Thoughts
People will be arguing about Hurricane Katrina for years, perhaps for decades. For many observers, the catastrophes that racked the Gulf Coast are allegories of failure, whether of command and control structure, of individual leadership, of urban and environmental planning the list will continue to grow as time passes. We think that Katrina demonstrated
Satellite photograph courtesy of the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration - Environmental Visualization Program

the fragility of a complicated service infrastructure overtaxed

by extraordinary events. Contributing to this vulnerability was the daunting complexity of federal, state, county, and local systems. In the end, it appears, they did not mobilize, communicate, or coordinate with the effectiveness demanded by a disaster of this magnitude. Louisianas 211 telephone referral services offered a bright contrast to this. Developed by the United Way, and now operating in more than 30 states, 211 services are consumer-focused, community-based information and referral centers that draw on community service databases. During the early phases of Katrina, one 211 center with telephone lines still operational served as a vital, statewide resource and played an important role in connecting residents with essential services.
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Building Better Community Service Information

There are important lessons in Louisianas 211 experience. In extraordinary circumstances, consumers urgently need information that can be delivered instantly. Novel developments in this case, with explosive speed and scale create tremendous demand for services and for information about accessing them. Service information systems, supported by well-designed databases, communications capability, and staff, can meet unexpected and vastly increased requirements for the entry, retrieval, and exchange of new information. Americas cities and towns have much to learn from this, but not simply about being prepared for natural or man-made disasters. Chicagos ten-year public housing transformation was certainly not a dislocation on Katrinas scale, but it did affect and continues to affect thousands of the citys families. Could Chicago have been better prepared had it possessed accurate, up-to-date, and comprehensive information on services available to communities affected by the transformation? How much better prepared could any Chicago family be today when suddenly confronted with a health crisis, the loss of a job, or the shuttering of a valued neighborhood resource? Many people in Chicago are asking the right kinds of questions questions like these and we think that the present affords a rare opportunity to answer them.

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