Community Profiles 2.0 provides insight into Grand Rapids neighborhoods

A new community information portal, designed and launched by the Johnson Center for Philanthropy at Grand Valley State University, will provide new insight into current trends and neighborhood-level analysis of the city of Grand Rapids through a unique and innovative design.

The new system, called Community Profiles 2.0, provides users with tools to map, compare, and identify trends in housing and economics, including home sales, foreclosures, household size, incomes, business types, and number of employees. The detailed data will provide more information than baseline Census data, and on a much more detailed geographic scale.

Community Profiles 2.0 incorporates previously untapped data into the system, which provides area government leaders, nonprofit organizations, and citizens alike with a powerful tool to track trends in areas where they live. The site incorporates improved user design for mapping, comparing, and trending different information sets for specific areas within the city, or to compare data from two different areas. Community Profiles 2.0 also introduces a new “Neighborhood Score” tool which allows users to score individual neighborhoods based on multiple indicators, along with a “Graduated Symbols” tool to view two data sets on the map simultaneously.

Data specifically tailored at a micro-level for the city of Grand Rapids is a feature of Community Profiles 2.0 that builds upon the work of other tools like MAPAS, the Johnson Center’s first-generation data mapping tool. The Johnson Center’s Community Research Institute (CRI) specifically designed the data and tools for this site to aid area-specific planning efforts within Grand Rapids communities.

The Johnson Center for Philanthropy’s CRI is working diligently toward the democratization of data to allow communities at all levels to access quality information while providing a high level of community research for various large stakeholder groups in the community and across the state. Doing work in a wide range of community research initiatives, researchers at the Community Research Institute have become experts in bringing hard-to-reach data to the community and providing evaluation and data stewardship to some of the largest philanthropic institutions in Michigan.

For more information about the Johnson Center and the Community Research Institute, visit johnsoncenter.org or cridata.org.