Hester Street worked closely with ten community-based organization partners in primarily low-income communities of color in New York City to co-design, develop, and collect a Community Impact Survey (CIS) to better understand the on-the-ground impacts of the COVID-19 crisis.
HST worked with each of the ten CBOs to co-develop survey questions that would support and inform their organizational goals, and provided ongoing technical assistance as they conducted survey outreach and collection in their respective communities. The project team hosted regular meetings with each organization to provide support with translation needs, printing, tracking completed and uploaded surveys, and troubleshooting any issues that arose with the survey platform or process. Ultimately, the partner CBOs collected nearly 1000 survey responses across all five boroughs. At the end, Hester Street analyzed the data and developed a public-facing, interactive online dashboard to help partner CBOs and other organizers and advocates utilize the community-collected data.
HST also conducted an analysis of citywide neighborhood indicators to identify vulnerability in areas across the city as they relate to education, health and personal wellbeing, job security and unemployment, housing security, and community support/resources. Looking at a range of indicators across school enrollment, unemployment rates, rent burdened households, community assets, and more. HST created a series of maps to paint a picture of these indicators as they relate to COVID-19 hot spots across New York City.
The result is a series of maps that graphically illustrate the most vulnerable neighborhoods across the city and informed our targeted approach for survey outreach, to ensure responses were collected from the communities most burdened by the impacts of COVID-19.