The city has invested in the power of GIS and data in recent years, using the tools to address issues ranging from accessibility to digital equity to voting, an endeavor that spans more than 15 years.
The Kensington Dashboard, launched in March by the Mayor’s Office of Philly Stat 360, integrates data from across city departments for a holistic view of the neighborhood as the city works to make targeted improvements. Philly Stat 360 is an initiative of Mayor Cherelle Parker, using data to provide the public with a more transparent view of its government’s work and to inform decision-making, its director, Kristin Bray, chief legal counsel to the mayor, said.
One of Parker’s day 1 priorities as mayor was to improve the community, Bray said, which started with declaring a public safety emergency. Kensington specifically, Bray said, faces issues including poverty, lack of infrastructure and an open-air drug market. Community engagement was part of the process to create the dashboard, helping city officials better understand the multifaceted nature of challenges Kensington faces. Because of their complexity, officials realized policing alone will not resolve the open-air drug market. A comprehensive approach is needed.
“Allowing us to attack those co-occurring issues will help us solve and revitalize this neighborhood faster,” Bray said.
Now, people living in Kensington and elsewhere can use the dashboard to see in real time if and how different aspects of the area are changing. The site also helps city departments understand how their partners are working together to deliver services better.
Data informs the mayor’s holistic strategy to address the community drug trade, Bray said; it is focused on supporting people with access to treatment for their substance use disorders, to make them stabler members of the community.
The dashboard also includes locations where the Office of Homeless Services and the Community Life Improvement Program are coordinating support efforts; the program is one of the city’s opportunities for same-day work and pay, with low or no barriers. The availability of neighborhood-specific data also lets officials see where issues like vacant lots exist, to help drive intervention strategies.
The dashboard paints a picture of the current status of these neighborhood characteristics, but progress too; it had zero shootings in February. Notably, the data also creates insight about who is perpetrating crimes in Kensington; its residents, Bray said, are not the people getting arrested for those incidents.
“That’s one of the things that data allows us to do is beat back against myths,” she said.
The dashboard provides data transparency regarding city service complaints, showing users the service complaints response data — even when the rate of closing them on time, 33 percent in February, demonstrates room for improvement.
“But if you don’t have that data, and you don’t have that transparency with the public, you can’t change what you’re doing,” Bray said.
One way community engagement shaped this project is in reaching a consensus on defining Kensington’s borders more expansively. Residents also wanted one location where they could find all the different activities community groups were providing, for a more interconnected service approach — so the city included the Kensington Event Calendar.
The Kensington Dashboard launched in March to tackle the challenges of that single neighborhood — but the project, Bray said, is only “the tip of the iceberg.”
“We are hoping to build this out over the next year for the rest of the city,” she said, noting that in creating the dashboard, many new data sets were added into the city’s open data system as a result.
Other communities in the city face their own unique challenges, she said; one area has a significant abandoned vehicle problem, and building out data there could help target interventions.
Philly Stat 360 plays a supportive role for other departments in making sure their data systems can be used for these purposes — helping them understand how to organize and digitize data so their employees and other agencies can use it effectively too.
“Because if we work together, we’re incredibly powerful — and we can make real change in the communities,” Bray said.
Other cities may use this dashboard and approach as a model. Bray recommended starting with “easy data sets,” and working with a partner that can help create data visualizations and make them accessible. She also underlined the importance of community engagement during planning: “We learned a lot from that community feedback about what we thought was important versus what the community thought was important.”
