Eleanor Tutt – Data Storyteller at Rise

/in /by

This article is next in a series intended to help you get to know our staff and the work they do at Rise.  Many people do not realize the level of expertise and commitment to community development among all of the Rise staff.  These are the folks that are doing the hard and sometimes extremely complex work it takes to bring everything together necessary to lift the quality of life in our communities.

Eleanor Tutt is certainly no stranger to hard and extremely complex work at Rise.  As Data Management Coordinator, Eleanor is responsible for analyzing Rise’s geospatial databases, collecting and publishing neighborhood indicator data (including building condition, demographic, social, and economic data), and creating Geographic Information System (GIS) maps for Rise planning and development projects.  She provides capacity-building technical assistance services to neighborhood organizations, introducing them to data management best practices and assisting them in the development of their own maps and databases.  If you have had the opportunity to spend any time at all with Eleanor, you know she is passionate about data and the power it has to shape, change and positively influence our neighborhoods and communities.  I am always amazed at the breadth and depth of the work she is involved in and her ability to get people excited about data. It’s hard not to get excited when you listen to any of her presentations or get involved in a conversation with her.  She makes it very clear how much she loves her job and how fortunate she is to get to do what she loves every day.  If you get the opportunity to attend one of Eleanor’s presentations, don’t pass it up. You will walk away with a new perspective on data.

On any given day Eleanor could be working on anything from the Off the Charts! 2: Data and the Arts for Social Change with the Regional Arts Commission (RAC), to setting up an interactive online dashboard related to problem properties for Dutchtown South Community Corporation, to updating and working on the Neighborhood Data Gateway (a source for data on St. Louis assets and opportunities managed and maintained by Rise), to organizational work for Build for STL and the National Day of Civic Hacking. Whew!  That’s a lot for anyone on any day to be working on and that is just to name a few of Eleanor’s projects.

Eleanor  also serves on the  Executive Committee of the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP) and on the Data Portal Committee of the East-West Gateway Council of Governments Regional Plan for Sustainable Development; she is a member of the St. Louis Chapter of the American Statistical Association, currently serving as its Treasurer; and is a member of InveSTL.

Eleanor has the unique ability to tell many different stories through data balanced with the ability to draw us in through her enthusiasm.  Her commitment to her work and her standard of excellence are both admirable and much needed by our communities, and most certainly here at Rise. LP

Want to try to keep up with Eleanor? Good luck! Follow her @eleanortutt

Brian Hurd to Present at 2014 Missouri APA State Conference

/in /by

Brian Hurd, Technical Assistance Project Manager at Rise, will be presenting “Community Development Corporations: Intermediaries Supporting Community Building and Community Interests”, Thursday October 16th at the 2014 Missouri American Planning Association State Conference.  The conference is Wednesday October 15 – Friday October 17, 2014 at the Westin Hotel in downtown St. Louis next to Busch Stadium. The theme is Building Sustainable Communities. Sustainable communities are commonly defined as places that have a variety of housing and transportation choices, with destinations close to home. The goal of a sustainable community is to lower transportation costs, reduce air pollution and stormwater runoff, decrease infrastructure costs, preserve historic properties and sensitive lands, save people time in traffic, be more economically resilient and meet market demand for different types of housing at different price points. For more information on the conference click here.

brianhurd

What do we really mean when we talk about gentrification? – Stephen Acree

/in /by

As someone who spends most of my time thinking about and doing community development work I know how easy it can be to make certain assumptions about the good work we are doing and to take for granted that we are on the “right side” of things.  I was reminded of this on a recent trip to Baltimore with some colleagues.  We were there to see for ourselves how Healthy Neighborhoods works to improve “middle neighborhoods.”  The mission of Healthy Neighborhoods is to help strong but undervalued Baltimore neighborhoods increase home values, market their communities, create high standards for property improvements, and forge strong connections among neighbors.  On our visit to the Reservoir Hill neighborhood the issue of gentrification was raised.  Our host, who was the director of the neighborhood organization, said that the real issue is the threat of marginalization.  While I have often responded to questions about gentrification by either noting that in weak markets, like St. Louis, with so much vacancy and abandonment, the actual displacement of residents is very infrequent; or by noting that raising the quality of life in neighborhoods by attracting more investment and people with disposable income also benefits the low-income people in the neighborhood because they will then live in higher quality neighborhoods with better amenities; both of which may well be true, neither of these answers the question of the potential for marginalization.  What most low-income people really fear when neighborhoods are in transition is that the power structure in their community will be altered and they will be marginalized in the process.  As community builders we have to address this legitimate concern  head-on by implementing strategies that take great pains to include low-income people in the change that happens in the communities where they live.  We should continually remind ourselves of this as we work to improve communities in our own region.

stephenacree

Stephen Acree

President/Rise Community Development

Rise Conducts Collaborative Grant Training 10.03.2014

/in /by

Rise conducted an annual training for the CDC Capacity Building & Collaborative Grants Program today at the Thomas Dunn Learning Center. 20 organizations were in attendance at the training and all questions from the Q&A session will be posted on our website by Wednesday, 10.08.2014. LOI’s are due on October 17, 2014. For full grant announcement click here. Questions? E-mail [email protected].