Robert Bennett
Principal, Resource Development Associates, Lafayette

POSITION STATEMENT

What are your research interests in the areas of inequality and equity, and what spatial dimensions do you currently or potentially see in them?

Our firm was developed to address issues of social and economic justice in urban communities. In pursuing that mission over the past 15 years we have come to focus on two areas:

Developing enhanced multidisciplinary human service systems serving high risk populations: Examples of the projects that I am currently directing include:

• Development/expansion of the Children�s System of Care in San Francisco and Contra Costa Counties. (Children�s Systems of Care integrate Juvenile Probation, Children�s Mental Health, Child Protective Services, and special education into a single coordinated, outcome-focuses system of interventions.)
• Design of an organized health system�including health care, substance abuse, and mental health services�for indigent, uninsured adults in Solano County
• Reorganization of Adult Mental Health Services in Solano and Marin Counties into a recovery-focused, consumer-driven system of care.
• Developing more effective and sustained interventions for chronically mentally-ill offenders in San Joaquin, Solano, and Marin counties.
• Evaluation and organizational development of community-based juvenile justice interventions in Richmond, Ca.
• Working with a larger group in San Francisco to create a strategic response plan for children ages 0-6 who are victims of family violence.

Developing comprehensive community-building initiatives. Although our firm is currently working on a number of community building projects, I am more focused at the present time on the systems development aspects of our work. My work in the past has included development of Oakland�s Empowerment Zone Strategic Plan, East Oakland Fighting Back (a community development initiative focusing on alcohol and drug demand reduction), Public Housing Revitalization and a variety of smaller community-oriented initiatives.

Our GIS work tends to be focused on questions related to the intersection of person and place in the distribution and causation of the problems we are addressing. These include:

• Geographic distribution of both the primary conditions and associated risk factors. To accomplish this, our general approach is to obtain multiyear dumps of data from County and City MIS systems serving the target population. We then clean and geocode the data to map global and local distributions and trends, identify hot spots, determine co-occurrence of particular conditions, analyze periodicities and other regularities that may illuminate causal issues or identify opportunities for more effective interventions.
• Geographic distribution of assets, including public and community-based services, transportation grids, areas of expanding commercial activity, etc. We link these GIS analyses to client-flow models to identify areas in which service disjunctions or anomalies are occurring.

• Development and evaluation of logic models for service systems. A clear understanding of the location of critical events and conditions is critical for assessing the causal links in program logic models.

What kinds of spatial data, models, techniques, software, etc. do you use or have considered using in your research. Which of these work well for you? Where do you see problems and/or shortcomings?

Our areas of concern�human services and community development�are extremely information-impoverished compared to other areas of our society. Each planning process or program evaluation usually sets up its own ad hoc data collection process. Both the validity of the results and the power and scope of the analytical tools employed are limited by this "cottage industry" approach to data collection, which yields very time-limited data for small populations. This is not because no other data is collected. In fact, public institutions collect voluminous records on their target populations. However, this data is characteristically locked away in antiquated, categorically-isolated public MIS systems. Our community�researchers, policy makers, advocates, consumers, and concerned citizens�needs an information infrastructure that provides access to critical data while protecting individual confidentiality.

To address this issue, we have begun several projects to create multidisciplinary data warehouses that will bring together a broad range of public databases and make them accessible to policy makers, community members, evaluators, and researchers (with suitable confidentiality protections for individual records) with a goal to improving community responses to issues of poverty, inequity, and their social correlates. Out three major current projects are:

San Francisco System of Care Children�s Information System: This system brings together 10 years of data from Juvenile Probation, Children�s Mental Health, and Child Protective services in a system that is used on the service delivery, policy, and evaluation levels. A custom software package developed by my staff provides menu-driven access to the data. GIS components (written in MapBasic within an overall Visual Basic system) include analysis of trends, client characteristics, and outcomes at the city, neighborhood, census tract, or census block level. The system is uploaded monthly with new data from each departmental MIS. Many other San Francisco agencies are asking to join the system, including Public Health and the Family Court. Access to the system is overseen by a users group co-chaired by the Chief Probation Officer and the Children�s Mental Health Director. This group is currently developing guidelines that will allow access to non-confidential subsets of the data by community members, non-profits, and researchers.

Contra Costa Futures: CC Futures has a concept similar to the San Francisco system, but a broader participation list, including three school districts, the County Health, Mental Health, CalWORKS, and Public Benefits systems, the County Housing Authority, and Juvenile Probation. We are also anticipating that all�or most�automated crime reports from the County�s 10 police departments will be included through court order. As we are currently working on the alpha version of this system, the users group has made no decision about who will be allowed to access this data.

Bay Area Public Policy Data Library: This an project that aims to assemble a broad array of publicly-available data related to social and economic conditions and to make it available to the public through a web-based mapping and analysis system.

Can you point out any "best practice examples" of spatially-oriented research in your field? Do you have any suggestions for Learning Resources CSISS might provide? Workshops we might offer?

I think that our field is generally methodologically backward. It would be extremely interesting to have a workshop to understand how we might adapt to our work methods including econometric modeling, data mining, and computer simulation. Such diverse disciplines as radio telemetry, weather forecasting, and ecological modeling may well have exciting insights to offer that would advance the state of our art.