Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Each year, local, state, and federal government spends more than a trillion dollars to support hundreds of thousands of local human service providers helping individuals and families improve their well-being, reach their full potential, and contribute to their communities. Each city, county, and state manages its own system of allocating contracts to human service providers. While jurisdictions maintain data on which providers get funding for what purpose, and track financial flows between public and private partners, it is currently not possible for any jurisdiction to easily and routinely answer basic system-wide questions about where services funded by different levels of government are delivered, who does and does not live within reach of these services, and what mix of services residents have access to. This is related to the fact that the system of service provision is highly decentralized, with disparate data sources, unstandardized data definitions and non-systematic coverage of key information on human services. However, as long as these questions cannot be answered, it will remain unclear whether, how and where service contract funding could be improved in terms of matching services with need. The government open data trend means that jurisdictions across the country are rapidly making administrative data available, but they need help developing applications to turn their data into analytic insights. This project develops an analytic framework to make sense of data on human service contracts by city, thereby offering a strategy to address these fundamental system-wide questions and determine whether, how and where the social service infrastructure could be improved.

Specifically, we address the questions of where services funded by different levels of government are delivered, who does and does not live within reach of these services, and what kind of service mix residents have access to in Chicago. At the core of this analysis is a Human Services (HS) Access Score -- similar to the popular Walk Score for residential amenities, but for human services. The HS Access score, computed on a scale of 0-100, is used in a spatial gap analysis to identify misalignment of service supply and demand across governmental level, by service type, and service mix for different populations in need (low-wage earners, low-income residents, and poor children and seniors). Trends in per capita spending and the impact of different what-if funding scenarios will also be computed based on the HS Access Score. This research is based on data we collected from city and state records on service contracts (2010-16) and linked to IRS 990 data on nonprofit service providers for Chicago. On the demand side, we are integrating data on low-wage earners and low-income residents from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics dataset (annual block level), IRS’ income data (annual, zip code level), and city social indicators (tract). This research is part of a prototype test phase to assess the feasibility of scaling the analytic framework to cities beyond Chicago.