Does Your Elected Representative Have a Map Gallery on Her Web Site?

Yesterday I received an email newsletter from Spotlight on Poverty that featured an interview with Dwight Evans of the 2nd Pennsylvania Congressional District. It mentioned that he hosts maps on his web site and I did some digging and interaction with Rep. Evans on Twitter, to find the link.

Below is a screen shot of his map gallery page, with a screen shot of the ESRI map that you get when you click on one of the map icons in his gallery.  (2-3-2020 Note: the link to the Map Gallery now is here)

If you spend some time on this blog you can read articles posted since 2008 encouraging Chicago and Illinois politicians to  use maps strategically to show where non-school, volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs are needed in their district, who is already there providing these services (and who often need help themselves), and places where the incumbent has delivered needed support. That could be dollars, volunteers, attention, partners, or all of these.

My past articles and the maps the Tutor/Mentor Connection created are intended to inspire and serve as templates for work others could be doing in many other places.  Click here, here, and here to see a collection of articles.

While I focus on helping youth tutor/mentor programs grow, the map platforms and articles that I point to show many indicators of need and could be used to help a wide range of service providers....a comprehensive system of support....be available in different map areas.

My father's family is from Philadelphia and I've many siblings, nieces and nephews living there, so I hope Rep. Evans and others will take a look at what I've suggested, and that they will send me links to pages on their web sites where they host map galleries and blog articles showing their use of maps.

At the same time, this use of maps should be happening in Chicago, Illinois, every US state and in every big city in the world.

However, I can't influence what happens in most of these places because I don't live there. However, there's a strategy that you can follow.

Last Tuesday the weekly ChiHackNight featured Judy Hertz, Executive Director of Midwest Academy She gave an introduction a power analysis, planning and community organizing strategy that I think many could benefit from using.

Browse the #ChiHackNight tweets from Tuesday, April 17, and you can see photos and comments from here presentation. Here's the video from Tuesday's session.


If you do the research and follow her recommendations, you can help people in every district figure out ways to influence people in power. It's a process. It takes work. The maps can help.

If your elected representative is using maps the way I'm suggesting and hosts a map gallery on his/her web site, send me your examples and I'll add them as updates to this article.

2/25/2019 update - Crime in the 25th Ward - this analysis was produced buy Troy Hernandez, a candidate for Alderman in the 25th Ward of Chicago.  Not every politician is a data scientist, but each should have someone working with them who can provide this type of analysis to inform the voters in their district and to guide public policy decisions.

Justice Map - Visualize Race & Income Data

My Twitter feed today included a Tweet that introduced me to the JusticeMap project. The screen shot at the left shows African American population in the US as a percent of total population.

This site  enables you to "Visualize race and income data for your community, county, and country. It includes tools for data journalists, bloggers and community activists."

It's easy to use. You can click one of the categories on the horizontal bar at the top of the map to create new map views, showing different demographic groups.

You can also zoom in to focus on different regions of the country. This map shows the Chicago region. You can zoom in even closer and add street maps, getting you down to the  neighborhood level.

My goal is that people learn to use maps like these to tell map-stories that point to places where people need extra  help, and repeat often enough that people are actually motivated to provide the talent, dollars, ideas and other resources needed to create change where it may be needed.

Here's a Tweet showing how someone created a map showing Hispanic population density.

Porcentaje de población hispana en Estados Unidos, según el censo de 2010. En el sitio https://t.co/vK8pVDFqnN hay mucha más data para cruzar. #ProductoAr
(Via @benjancewicz) pic.twitter.com/NsswTkJFya

— Pablo M. Fernández (@fernandezpm) April 4, 2018

If you skim through past articles on this blog you'll find other data mapping platforms and you'll see many ways I've used maps to tell stories intended to help volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs grow in high poverty areas of Chicago.

Here's another Tweet showing how you can focus in on a small area:

Cuyahoga would be the blackest part of Ohio. pic.twitter.com/plxPsG0zFX

— Nate Shorts (@SmutJawnNate) April 4, 2018

Browse feed of Tweets by benjancewicz and see how many are interacting with this platform and with each other on Twitter.

Create your own map stories and share them on social media. Help build the conversation.

Number of High Poverty Chicago Youth in Each Community Area - Change since 2011

In 2011 I produced a PDF report showing the number of Chicago youth, age 6-17, who were living in high poverty households in each community area.

This week I've received new information from the Social Impact Research Center at the Heartland Alliance, and have updated the presentation to show current numbers.

The map shown above is from the new report.  2011 numbers are shown in yellow and 2018 number in blue. This map shows the far west side where the number of high poverty youth in the Austin neighborhood has increased while in areas close to the Chicago LOOP the number has decreased.

Here's the full presentation which I've posted on Slideshare:

Chicago Community Areas: Youth In Poverty-2018 from Daniel Bassill

My goal is that people form study groups, planning groups and support groups in each community area and they use this data in an on-going effort to help build and sustain well-organized, non-school, volunteer-based tutor, mentor and learning programs in areas with a large number of kids living in poverty.

I'd be happy to spend time with such groups, helping them understand the data and the resources available to them on the Tutor/Mentor Connection and Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC web sites.

In the report I indicated that the maps came from the Chicago Tutor/Mentor Program Locator which was created in 2008-09. I also said that I've not been able to update this since 2013 due to lack of funds and technology support.

The Program Locator still works and serves as a demonstration of the type of mapping portal needed to help people find existing tutor/mentor programs, understand the availability of such programs in different community areas, and understand who some of the assets are who should be supporting youth  in different community areas because they have facilities in those areas.

If you'd like to help, or want to meet with me,  introduce yourself on Twitter, LinkedIN or Facebook or email me at tutormentor 2 at earthlink dot net.

Mapping Income Levels and Population Changes

Last week I found a City Lab article titled How Cities Are Divided By Income, Mapped , which uses ESRI story maps to show the income inequality in cities across the USA.

At the right is a screen shot of the ESRI story map.

For those who are concerned about these gaps, and the well-being of people living on the poverty and low-income side, these articles will add ammunition to your efforts.

Here's another map, that I learned about from my ChiHackNight network.  This shows population changes in US cities from 1990 to 2010. The graphic at the left is a screen shot showing the Chicago region. Green dots are cities with population gains and red and pink are cities that lost population.  Click on any dot and see the gain or loss.

For those studying poverty and income equality, as well as racism, education, violence, etc. the population changes  may add some additional information to your analysis.

For any activist, these articles will demonstrate ways to embed maps into stories, with the goal of helping you draw attention, resources and solutions to places where the maps show a need for extra support.

Understand Graduation Rate in Every State

The America's Promise Alliance hosts a map on its web site showing graduation rate data for every US state. Take a look.

Earlier today I posted an ESRI storymap showing places around the world where each of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals needs to be addressed.

With that map, and this map, I said "Great work. Useful data." Then said "We need to look at this information at the block level, or at the zip code level" (not sure how this works in other countries).

The state and national level are too large. Within such boundaries are many places where there is much greater need than what the average shows, and other places doing far better.

The Education Trust Data Tool

Here's another map. This is shows inequality and funding gaps (2018) in school funding from state to state. States shaded green provide greater funding to schools serving high numbers of low income kids. States shaded pink  and red (Illinois) provide less funding to these students than to other schools in the state.  View article here and data tool here.

If you compare the different maps shown on this map you begin to see that areas with high poverty show up as places needing extra help.

Building the public will to provide that help is something the Tutor/Mentor Connection (T/MC) and Tutor/Mentor Institute, LLC (T/MI) have focused on since 1993.

Mapping UN's Sustainable Development Goals - ESRI Story map

At left is a screen shot from an ESRI story map that shows areas of concentration for each of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals. Take a look.

These goals target the year 2030 for an achievement date and for the past year a growing effort has attempted to get more people involved.  I wrote about this on the Tutor/Mentor blog, here, and here.

I've been following the #SDGs on Twitter.

Last August I created this graphic, combining my Race-Poverty in US concept map with the SDGs graphic. My goal was to show that places in the US face some of the same issues, and that all the issues are interconnected and have poverty as a root cause, or as a primary result.

While I think the ESRI map is great, I feel that individual story maps need to be created for each of the 17 goals, and that these  maps need to focus on areas as small as a few blocks, in every country.  This would show areas in the US and Europe where people live in pockets of poverty, isolated from the wealth that surrounds them.

While we need a global mobilization, problems will only be solved at the local level and without maps it's hard to focus on all of these places, or know if resources are being provided to help people overcome their challenges.

I've been aggregating links to data-mapping platforms, and share that information via this blog, a concept map, and links in my web library.

I hope that in the near future I can find a site that if building a similar collection of links, focusing on the Sustainable Development Goals.