MakingConnections

Here's Marge Turner at Metrotrends making good points about Annie E. Casey's retrospective on the  Making Connection Initiative. It's important that they've been upfront about the shortcomings of the initiative, but Turner rightfully points out that the point of Making Connections wasn't only about directly changing those neighborhoods.

We've gotten great data from these ten cities across the country, and from great data great research (here's a link to all 93 papers just the Urban Institute has put together using MC data). I would also add that focusing on ten cities (Denver, Louisville, Des Moines, Providence, White Center, Oakland, San Antonio, Hartford, Indianapolis, Milwaukee) to study poverty and mobility  has added depth to the field. It's a field that either zooms out too much and misses important details or zooms in too much and always to the same places (Chicago, Boston).

And focusing on these ten neighborhoods doesn't just mean we've crunched all their numbers. Just the fact that the Casey Foundation did the work of defining the neighborhoods themselves has made the job easier for researchers interested in focusing their efforts on certain places. Here's a project I got to work on that used just two MC neighborhoods as the basis for a qualitative study, for example.