Contact: Mike Greco, Communications Coordinator, CURA, 612-625-7501, curaweb@umn.edu; Kris Nelson, NPCR program manager, (612) 625-1020, nelso193@umn.edu

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (8/25/2003) -- A two-year, $132,000 grant from The Minneapolis Foundation’s Community Action Funds has been awarded to the University of Minnesota’s Center for Urban and Regional Affairs for its Neighborhood Planning and Community Revitalization (NPCR) program. Part of the money will allow NPCR to use electronic devices to gather data and expand the use of geographic information systems for neighborhood planning and more efficient data collection.

Neighborhood Planning and Community Revitalization plans to use the grant to support the collection of accurate neighborhood data, to integrate neighborhood data with public data in order to analyze and present neighborhood conditions and issues, and to provide support for inter-neighborhood cooperation to more effectively advocate for plans and programs to benefit neighborhoods.

Neighborhood organizations are rich storehouses of information and knowledge; unfortunately, a lot of this knowledge is not documented or organized for effective use. By establishing common data formats, data archives, entry forms and report formats, NPCR can help standardize data documentation to improve comparisons over time and cross neighborhood use of data.

To make data gathering more efficient, Palm Pilots or other hand-held electronic devices will be used to enter and electronically download data onto a spreadsheet for tabulation. NPCR will also investigate creating shared data storage on the NPCR Web site to archive information and facilitate cross-neighborhood analysis.

NPCR is part of a growing number of projects that involve multiple neighborhoods. One example is the North Minneapolis Southeast Asian Initiative, which involves four neighborhood organizations and the Southeast Asian Community Council. This initiative responds to a need for better communication between Southeast Asian residents in North Minneapolis.

Neighborhood Planning for Community Revitalization has been providing research assistance to Minneapolis and St. Paul neighborhood organizations and community development corporations for 10 years. NPCR supports student research assistants—and occasionally faculty researchers—to carry out neighborhood-initiated and neighborhood-guided projects. NPCR is on the Web at www.npcr.org.

CURA has been connecting resources at the University of Minnesota with community and neighborhood organizations for 35 years. In addition to NPCR, CURA supports more than a dozen programs that provide research support and technical assistance to community organizations and government agencies throughout Minnesota. CURA is on the Web at www.cura.umn.edu

The Minneapolis Foundation is a statewide center for philanthropy, distributing more than $30 million in grants each year, sharing its philanthropic expertise with other foundations and engaging the community on critical social issues through public information campaigns and meetings.

The Minneapolis Foundation manages assets of approximately $500 million, administers more than 700 charitable funds and partners with a variety of communities and institutions to improve the quality of life in our region. Established in 1915, The Minneapolis Foundation is the oldest foundation in Minnesota and one of the nation’s largest community foundations. For more information, go to www.MinneapolisFoundation.org.

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