Population & Households Data - Cook County, IL

My friend Layton Olson shared a link to the Cook County Community Data Snapshots on the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning website.  Open the Dashboard and you can view the data at the county, municipality and Chicago Community Area levels.  

I open the Municipality page at this link.  You can use the drop down menu to pick a community in Cook County that you want to view.  You can also select for different types of data. I chose "Population & Households".   I'm showing three examples.

Alsip

Aurora

North Chicago

For each area selected you get a view like those I've shown.  It has a map of the community showing its location in Cook County.  And it has five visualizations of the data, showing Race & Ethnicity, Language spoken at home, if not English, Household size, Age cohorts, and Household Income.

Planners who are concerned about income inequality and the negative affects of high poverty can easily see what percent of people in each area have household income below $25,000 or ranging from $25,000 to 49,000.

These would indicate how many people in the community need extra support from public and private sector support.  I'd love to find a version of these maps, with overlays showing youth serving programs in the area, sorted by type of program, age group served, etc.

Ideally someone would create a tool to collect and sort information about non-school and school-based tutor, mentor and learning programs and show where these are located, using demographic overlays to show where they are most needed.

Oh. We did that. 

View this PDF essay to see features we built into the Chicago Tutor/Mentor Program Locator when we first put it on-line in 2004, then when we updated it in 2008. 

Then view this "everyone's a map-maker" essay to see how maps could be created and integrated into public education campaigns. 

Unfortunately, I was not able to keep the Program Locator updated after 2011 and on-line after 2018.  It's now only available as and archive that anyone can use in building their own version.

In one section of the Tutor/Mentor library I point to on-line directories that I've learned about.  One project any university might adopt would be to build a program locator for their city, then have students keep it updated and leading public awareness campaigns that draw parents, volunteers, donors, media, policy-makers, and other users, with the goal of helping existing programs support long-term involvement of youth and volunteers, while helping new programs form were more are needed.

Another project would be to build a library with links to Program Locator type directories in every city in the USA and the world. That would be an extensive resource!

I'd be happy to help any university that wants to take this role.

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