Time March 2–9, 2020For nearly 20 years, Dolores aceveDo-Garcia has
been collecting data on the access—and lack thereof—
that children in neighborhoods across the U.S. have to
necessities like healthy food and a good edu cation. She
and her team at the Institute for Child, Youth and Fam-
ily Policy at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., man-
age diversitydatakids.org, a data project designed to guide
the high-level policy decisions that affect childhood and
equality.
This information has helped local policymakers and
institutions understand where to target programs to im-
prove outcomes for their cities’ children. For example, last
year researchers at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago
incorporated the data in an analysis of car-accident injury
records. They found that injured children who weren’t
properly secured in a car seat were more likely to live in
neighborhoods that rank low on the Brandeis scale for
childhood opportunity. This spurred the hospital to ramp
up services that offer free car seats and car-safety educa-
tion to families in those areas.
In Boston, in the summer of 2017, when a community
member saw evidence that young people didn’t have
enough to eat, that person alerted the Vital Village
Network, a group of health care, social-services and
education workers who create outreach programs in low-
rated neighborhoods. Using the Brandeis research in
conjunction with food-access data, the group launched
an app in late 2018 called Abundance Boston that directs
residents in those areas to sources of affordable, healthy
food ranging from food pantries and farmers’ markets to
free spaghetti nights. Hundreds of residents have used
the app, ranking and discussing their experiences, which
alleviates the stigma of talking about the challenges of
feeding their children.
And in Albany, N.Y., recreation commissioner Jona-
than P. Jones used the data to locate areas that lack green
spaces, and set out to rebuild or revitalize playgrounds
and parks around the city, with a particular focus on
neighborhoods that lacked these facilities. The five-year,
$2 million project is well under way, with 13 playgrounds
overhauled since 2015. Jones says property values are al-ready going up around the parks, and be-
cause each site has different equipment,
people are visiting areas they otherwise
wouldn’t. “It forces you to go into a com-
munity,” Jones says. “It forces people to
be one city.”
In January, Acevedo- Garcia and her
team published the latest edition of the
Child Opportunity Index, an ambitious
project that takes a deep look at 47,000
neighborhoods across the 100 largest U.S.
metro areas, scoring them from 1 to 100,
where a higher number means more
childhood opportunity based on 29 key
measures.
Acevedo-Garcia’s data evaluating chil-
dren’s access focuses on how the next
generation is faring. But children are, of
course, a proxy for the community as a
whole. The life expectancy of residents
in neighborhoods with very low scores on
her child-opportunity scale is 75 years, for
example. In very high- opportunity neigh-
borhoods, it’s 82.TIME worked with Acevedo-Garcia
to see if her neighborhood data could
point us to metropolitan areas with
comparatively high levels of equal op-
portunity. That meant searching for
areas with relatively small gaps be-
tween the highest- and lowest-ranked
neighborhoods.
This information is useful because,
even when places have the same op-
portunity level overall, actually liv-
ing in those cities can be a very differ-
ent experience. For example, Colorado
Springs and Detroit both score an over-
all opportunity level of 55. But in Colo-
rado Springs, a typical high- opportunityIn search ofan equal city
HOW CITIES ACROSS THE U.S. ARE CLOSING OPPORTUNITY GAPS BY EMILY BARONE