Summary

The West Philly Promise Neighborhood was a U.S. Department of Education funded grant to support "cradle-to-career" opportunities for children living or going to school in Belmont, East Parkside, Mantua, Mill Creek, Powelton Village, and West Powelton/Saunders Park. The initiative sought to improve education, health, and economic successes for children, their families and communities.

Data and Research Core

The role of the Data and Research Core was to build an infrastructure for research, evaluation, data access, and dissemination for the West Philly Promise Neighborhood initiative. The goal of the Core was to develop data systems to measure whether Promise Neighborhood achieved its goals and to sustain lasting change within the Promise Neighborhood community.

The US Department of Education required that we collect data on 15 population-level indicators, called GPRAs (Government Performance Results Act) to track our progress toward achieving our goals. To do so, we collected data at the child, family, neighborhood, and school-level to support, inform and evaluate the project. Here is some information on all the ways we collected data:

Neighborhood Survey

This survey was conducted every other year with caregivers from households with children ages 0-18 who lived in the Promise Neighborhood geographic footprint. The purpose of this survey was to better understand caregivers’ and families’ experiences with their schools, neighborhoods, health care, whether and how they interacted with the Promise Neighborhood initiative, and how these things changed over time. You might have recognized our survey team by their orange shirts! Our first survey wrapped up in 2018, the second survey ended in early 2020, the third survey finished in early 2022.

Some of the population-level measures that we collected through the Neighborhood Survey were:

• GPRA 1: Number and percent of children, from birth to kindergarten entry, who have a place where they usually go, other than an emergency room, when they are sick or in need of advice about their health.
• GPRA 3: Number and percent of children, from birth to kindergarten entry, participating in center-based or formal home-based early learning settings or programs, which may include Early Head Start, Head Start, childcare, or publicly funded preschool.
• GPRA 12: For children birth to kindergarten entry, the number and percent of parents or family members who report reading to their children three or more times a week.
• GPRA 13: For children in kindergarten through 8th grades, the number and percent of parents or family members who report encouraging their children to read books outside of school.
• GPRA 14: For children in the 9th to 12th grades, the number and percent of parents or family members who report talking with their child about the importance of college and career.

If you would like to review the Neighborhood Survey data, we have published the codebooks for the 2018, 2019, and 2021 surveys. You can request individual level data from us by reviewing our data request protocol and filling out our data request form.

District Wide School Survey

Each year the School District of Philadelphia conducts a school climate survey with students, parents, teachers, and principals. We partnered with the School District to collect the following data from this survey for our 7 Promise Neighborhood schools:

• GPRA 8: Number and percent of children who participate in at least 60 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity daily.
• GPRA 9: Number and percent of children who consume five or more servings of fruits and vegetables daily.
• GPRA 10: Number and percent of students who feel safe at school and traveling to and from school, as measured by a school climate needs assessment.
• GPRA 15: Number and percent of students who have school and home access (and percentage of the day they have access) to broadband internet and a connected computing device.

Neighborhood Indicators

Through analysis and visualization of existing data sources such as the US Census data, Neighborhood Indicators provided information to contextualize factors impacting the West Philly Promise Neighborhood. This may have included neighborhood context such as housing, safety, and the demographic characteristics of residents. We also summarized between—and within—neighborhood information about population-level outcomes such as education and health, with the added purpose of detecting any change over time as a result of Promise Neighborhood or other programs.

The data snapshots created by our team help to achieve the above purposes and were created to share with community-based organizations and leaders to advance their own community programming and advocacy goals.

Promise Information Portal (PIP)

The Promise Information Portal (PIP) was a secure, web-based data system used to track implementation of Promise Neighborhood-funded programs, such as participation and participant outcomes. The purpose of the PIP was to provide a common data collection system for Promise Neighborhood-funded programs, and to understand how many children and families are served by this initiative over time, and whether these investments resulted in improvements to the community, as measured by changes in GRPA indicators data over time.

Organizational Network Survey

One of the key goals of the West Philly Promise Neighborhood (PN) was to create a system of supports for children and families who live in or attend school in the neighborhood. To create this system, PN partnered with a broad network of providers and organizations including government agencies, schools, social service providers, community-based organizations, and neighborhood civic associations.

The PN Data team worked with the SoDI Lab at the Autism Institute, led by Dr. Elizabeth Hassrick, to conduct an organizational network survey with PN’s partners in 2021. Each partner organization was asked about their connections and collaborations with other PN partners, including the frequency, content, and quality of those collaborations. Partners were grouped into 6 categories: schools, healthcare organization, program implementers, advisory, leadership and early childhood programs. We developed a report about each group of partners. In these reports, there was an introduction to networks and how to understand network maps. Then we displayed the connections within and between the different groups of partners. We ended with overall additional findings of the network survey, including the impact of COVID and the Promise Neighborhood initiative on our partners’ connections with each other.

These reports show that the PN network contains a thriving and dedicated group of organizations committed to working together to achieve the goals of the West Philly Promise Neighborhood.