COMMUNITY INTELLIGENCE PRIMER 3
A recent how-to intro to what we do, how we do and who we are.
Community Intelligence, a primer
A different way to see a community.
We exist to bring trust back to the places it’s gone missing.* Community Intelligence reads how each neighborhood is organized to trust, so a grant, a loan or a program can travel a route the community will take.
*Trust rarely disappears. More often it relocates, from institutions to the relationships people can count on.
Same dollars, same offer, different outcome
Picture two neighborhoods a few miles apart, both receiving the same program: down-payment help, a health screening, a small business loan. Same dollars, same offer, same good intentions.
Uptake is strong. Residents walk into the office, fill out the forms and take the help. The program works, and the report shows it.
The need is greater and the poverty deeper, yet the money sits and few residents come forward. The offer arrived through a door they don’t walk through.
The difference was the route. Every investment in a community quietly faces one question: will this travel a road people are willing to take? Few organizations can answer it before the money goes out.
Why attributes can’t answer it
A pile of attributes: income, race, crime, education, home values. It describes a neighborhood well. It can’t tell you how that neighborhood will receive something, so the route stays invisible until the money has gone down it.
A neighborhood as a structure, built layer by layer toward trust in institutions or toward trust in each other. Read the structure and the route becomes visible in advance.
How we read a neighborhood
We read every census tract in four layers, from public data, with nothing about any individual person. Each layer helps explain the one above it.
Structure
Is the place built to function?Can residents reach the clinic, the agency, the bank on foot or by transit? Where reach is thin, routing through institutions is hard even for people who would choose to.
Alignment
Do people use what’s there?Where services are reachable and used, the institutional route stays open. Where they are reachable but unused, the gap is a signal: the problem is trust, and adding supply won’t close it.
Cohesion
What holds the place together?Some neighborhoods cohere outward, around shared institutions. Others cohere inward, around family, congregation and the block. Inward cohesion is how communities hold together when institutions pull back, and it is a strength.
Trust
Which door does it run through?We call the result a neighborhood’s Trust Orientation. Outward-facing neighborhoods respond to a direct approach from a lender or agency. Rooted, inward-facing ones respond when the same offer arrives first through a pastor, a neighbor or a block club.
The layers describe how we read a place. Whether changing one layer shifts the others is something we test with partners before we claim it.
What the read shows that an attribute map can’t
- Poverty and access are different mapsCenter Street Marketplace, at 20.9% poverty, sits near the bottom on reachability. Hillside, at 49.4%, sits near the top. Targeting by income sends programs to the wrong door.
- A citywide average hides the neighborhoodsIn Racine, institutional reach ranges from 16.6 to 58.9 across neighborhoods in one city. Unreachable describes a resolution failure, not a place.
- Institutions misread their own communitiesIn Houston, neighborhoods read 53.5% guardian against the 25% institutions assumed, a 28.5-point gap between how communities are pitched and how they are organized.
- The floor is findable before money movesThe neighborhoods a standard program misses first, relationship-routed and hard to reach, can be identified in advance.
The two tools in use today
Floor Identification
Finds the neighborhoods a standard program will miss first: the least connected to institutions, identified before any money moves.
Reachability
Shows whether residents can get to where a service is offered, on foot or by transit. It runs on a separate map from poverty, and often a very different one.
Both are drawn from the same four-layer read. Coverage spans more than 1,190 neighborhoods across 35 cities, with every U.S. census tract in scope.
We test it in public, and we report our misses
A different way of seeing is worth little if it only sounds good. Predictions are written down in advance with numbers and a direction, sealed before any result exists, and held by someone outside the analysis. Success and failure are defined beforehand, and every result is reported.
A sealed miss, published
Before a Wisconsin primary we sealed a prediction that our measure would rank six neighborhoods by turnout. It didn’t. It identified the floor correctly and got the middle and top wrong. So we offer floor identification, and we narrowed the claim in writing to what the read has earned.
The next round
A larger sealed round across three cities checks whether the floor holds in each, whether the read adds anything beyond a poverty measure, and whether the same signal shows up in use of preventive health care. If it adds nothing beyond poverty, we will say so.
Turnout is our thermometer: a hard, public measure of whether a neighborhood engages with an institution. We don’t predict who wins, work for campaigns or measure political preference.
What we are, and what we will not tell you
A structural read of how each neighborhood is organized to trust, tested in public and narrowed to what it has earned. It is a different instrument from a poverty map or demographic targeting.
- Who, by name. Every reading describes a place, never a person. Finding the trusted people in a neighborhood is fieldwork the read informs.
- A ranking of every neighborhood. We find the floor reliably and leave the order above it alone.
- A live gauge. Each read is a structural picture refreshed over time and won’t catch a two-week swing.
- Anything finer than a census tract. Neighborhoods that share a tract read the same.
- A guess dressed as a finding. Where data is thin, we label the reading an estimate and hold back a recommendation.
We read communities for their strengths and how they are organized. A neighborhood that routes through relationships has a different door, and it can be reached.
Team
An exclusive joint venture of three organizations, with specialists across behavioral science, engineering, research and delivery.
Community as a Service: purpose, management and service delivery, with specialist lines in research, communications and advisory.
The behavioral science behind the read, held to a Hypothesis Register that governs every claim we make.
The platform that measures trust, built and run by a dedicated technical team.
Who does the work
Leadership: Kevin Starace, Founder/CEO, RFUTR, and Dr. Bob Raleigh, CEO, PathSight Predictive Science.
Know the door before you knock.
The structure of a neighborhood sets the route its trust will take. Read it first, and every investment can arrive through a door the community opens.