The Child Poverty Action Lab developed the Community Resource Index to understand how communities in Dallas compare to one another on a wide range of conditions. In particular, we created the Index to help inform community based organizations, such as neighborhood groups or nonprofits, and local governmental agencies when it comes to determining programmatic investments in different areas of Dallas. Too often, organizations may target their efforts in schools or communities where they perceive the easiest path forward - which may not align to areas in greatest need. The CRI provides one mechanism for prioritizing the types of services needed in different areas of the city.
The current version of the CRI focuses explicitly on the communities that surround every elementary, middle, and high school campus within the Dallas Independent School District. To accomplish this, we compiled data and indicators across five key areas (Community, Economics, Education, Family, and Health) which were then standardized and combined into five subindices based off the results of a Principal Components Analysis. Individual indicators were weighted to calculate the five subindices based on the results of PCA dimensions affiliated with a given community. These weighted sub-indices were then combined into the final Community Resource Index, which you can explore at {website link}.
It is our hope that the CRI be used by local governments, nonprofit and philanthropic organizations, as well as local community organizations to prioritize and target their services to communities most in need. If you work at an organization in Dallas, or elsewhere, and want to understand how the CRI was calculated in greater detail, we have provided as much of the process in this Github Repository, including R Code and an Esri ArcGIS Pro Toolbox. You may additionally access the data that was used in our calculations, at the Campus level as well as at the Census tract level in .csv format.