Mapping Community Health Assessment and Mobilizing Resources

This graphic is a screen shot from the Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA)Health Indicators Map Gallery. When you open the site the maps show Atlanta. Just type in Chicago, or your own city, and new maps are created for your city.

With this type of information anyone can be creating stories showing the public where people need extra help, and could also be using resources like the Chicago Tutor/Mentor Program Locator, to overlay information showing existing service providers in each part of the community.

Throughtout this blog and the Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC blog, stories include maps and graphics. These are intended to provide a better understanding of where and why volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs are needed, while motivating people in business, hospitals, universities, faith groups, media and politics to provide the time, talent, dollars and other resources needed by youth serving organizations in these neighborhoods.

In this page I show how interns are integrating our maps and graphics into new media, that reach people in their own networks. Similar visualizations could be created using the maps from this Community Health Needs Assessment web site.

If we teach young people to create these presentations, we teach them to think of all the actions needed to make a social service available in a neighborhood with indicators of high need for services. If they learn to use video, blogs, public presentations and music to attract attention and motivate people to become involved, they learn skills of problem solving and leadership that they can apply for the rest of their lives.

Youth don't need to create the original data and map platforms. They need to be able to tell stories using these data resources.