A partnership between Atlanta's westside communities and institutions of higher education.
The Atlanta Housing Authority’s Housing Choice Voucher program waitlist will be open from March 15th – March 21st online at http://ahawaitlist.org/ or at the hotline: 1-855-242-7701.
The Westside Resource Center, located at 907 Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, will host volunteers that week and expand their hours of operation to accommodate anyone wanting to sign up for the waitlist. 
The 2016 Westside_Snapshot was created by WCA Data Dashboard Project Manager using the Data Dashboard. It provides an overview of important demographics and statistics comparing the Westside (NPUs K, L, and T) to the City of Atlanta. The Westside Snapshot was released at the WCA’s Five Year Anniversary Community Development Symposium.
Through this document, we seek to continue to make data more accessible and understandable, by physically putting qualitative information into people’s hands.
All NPUs were invited to review and comment on the snapshot before we released the document. We will continue to collect data and update the document as new data sets are released or community suggestions are made.
On April 1st, 2016, at the Transform Westside Summit, the Westside Future Fund’s hired architecture group Thadani + Associates unveiled their first of six Land Use Action Plans for the westside. The previous Tuesday at Higher Ground Empowerment Center in Vine City, the group, led by Dhiru Thadani of Washington D.C. introduced their plans for the coming months and hosted the public engagement meeting for the Joseph E. Boone/Mims Park area.
Notes from the public engagement meeting can be found here: Boone/Mims Park Meeting: Westside Future Fund.
On Friday, only 59 hours after meeting with the community, Mr. Thadani presented the “draft” plan for this section of this community, noting that he finished some of the drawings mere hours before producing the slideshow. The length of the presentation prevented many people from asking questions but common areas of concern were the lack of community input into the plan (few ideas from the community seemingly made it into the suggestions), and lack of education/schools in the plan.
All official information from Westside Future Fund and Thadani + Associates can be found at: www.PlanWestside.com
Last week, WCA staff attended the launch of the Westside Innovation Lab at the Center for Civic Innovation. The application submission is now live! CCI is looking for people and organizations with innovative ideas to address social challenges in their own neighborhoods on the westside of Atlanta. Applications are due on April 25, 2016. Please consider applying or passing this on to someone, or an organization, you know that may be a good fit. Winning submissions will be chosen BY THE COMMUNITY. Those winning ideas (6-8) will receive seed funding and technical assistance in their entrepreneurial endeavors.
Submit your idea now! http://www.civicatlanta.org/westside-idea-submmision
If you are interested in volunteering time or skills: http://www.civicatlanta.org/westside-volunteer
CCI has hired two new program managers that will be focused on this initiative full-time: Raina Turner and Nathan Jones. Reach out to them at westside@civicatlanta.org
The Westside Communities Alliance introduced a comprehensive interactive Data Dashboard for Atlanta on February 11th.
The WCA Data Dashboard serves as a one-stop shop for key data that is accessible to community stakeholders, researchers, local government agencies, and relevant foundations interested in sustainable Westside community development.
“We believe that this tool has the potential to encourage greater data-driven decision-making at the neighborhood and Neighborhood Planning Unit (NPU) level in addition to supporting research and policymaking that addresses significant challenges in areas of education, economic development, transit and mobility, and public safety,” said WCA Associate Director Mackenzie Madden.
In its current form, the dashboard offers resources in seven categories: 1) Community Profiles, 2) Economic Development, 3) Education, 4) Public Safety, 5) All Data, 6) Historical Data, and 7) Resource Library.
Presently, the dashboard displays information for NPU’s K, L, and T – the three NPUs connected to the WCA – as compared to the City of Atlanta.
The dashboard is a user-friendly tool that: 1) draws upon available quantitative and qualitative data, 2) stores data collected for current and future research initiatives, 3) provides metrics for assessing the success of diverse engagement and intervention models, and 4) develops comprehensive reports to identify the impact of “anchor institutions” such as Georgia Tech on neighboring communities to highlight knowledge gaps.
The Data Dashboard project began in 2011 as a static Westside neighborhoods asset map created in conjunction with faculty in the Georgia Tech College of Architecture. Under the leadership of Dean Royster and her WCA leadership team, the first virtual tool was created in Fall 2013 by a group of graduate students in Dr. John Stasko’s Data Visualization class. That iteration mapped transit and walkability in the city. The platform also provided a heat map of census data that has since been transformed into the Big Data tool available today. Graduate Research Assistants in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts continued building the dashboard into its present form.
Katie O’Connell, MCRP 2015, was hired as the Project Manager for the Data Dashboard in Summer 2014. She began by researching similar platforms across the country and collecting relevant data for the city of Atlanta. During an Online Tools session of the WCA’s 2014 Community Studio, O’Connell was able to determine the basic pros and cons of existing resources such as the Atlanta Regional Commission’s Neighborhood Nexus, the U.S. EPA’s Enviromapper, and the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Several focus groups with Westside residents and stakeholders were held as various portals were designed to garner feedback on the usability of the dashboard.
The WCA staff has presented the dashboard at various conferences and symposia including The Center for Community Progress’ Vacant Properties Conference in 2015, Atlanta Studies Symposium, TEDx Atlanta, and the Georgia Tech Center for Urban Innovation.
The WCA Data Dashboard has been made possible through various stages of development in collaboration with entities at Georgia Tech including College of Architecture, College of Computing, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, the Center for Geographic Information Systems, and with funding from the Ford Foundation.
Please visit wcadatadashboard.iac.gatech.edu to explore the platform. Please use the hashtag #WCADataDashboard in social media settings, when referencing the tool.