I'm Stephen Henderson.

Detroit residents, community groups, and government officials have a new online tool available to help assess the strengths and weaknesses in the city's neighborhoods.

This tool is called the Neighborhood Vitality Index, and the data measures things like residents health, their feelings of safety, the neighborhood's condition, and many, many other things.

The information is broken out by council districts.

I spoke with one of the project's partners, Jane Morgan, of JFM Consulting Group, about how this data is collected and how it can be used.

So I'm really excited about this idea of being able to go someplace and get information about how neighborhoods are doing in the city.

I feel like this is something we've needed for a long time.

Tell me about the Neighborhood Vitality Index.

- Sure, thanks.

And yes, you're correct.

This has been really a long time in the making.

It's something, for me as a planner and evaluator, that I really wanted to see Detroit have.

Some other cities have had this for a while, but we have not.

So the Neighborhood Vitality Index is really a community-driven effort.

It was developed with input from community development organizations, funders, and others.

I mean, lots of people over a period of several years.

So this wasn't just something that was thrown together.

We wanted to ensure that the voices of the community were reflected in the design of the Neighborhood Vitality Index.

It's a tool that's designed to bring together resident experience, resident voice with some other community data so that there's, consistently, and we hope on an annual basis, data that shows progress and change in Detroit's neighborhoods.

- Yeah, yeah.

So that piece about information from Detroiters being part of this, I think, is so critical because so much of what we see about the city, either media or data, I think, often comes from the outside.

It's others' impressions about what's happening in Detroit.

This is really aimed at trying to make sure that Detroiters can say for themselves, "Here's what's happening in my community."

- Yep, and not just Detroiters themselves saying this, we wanted to make sure that Detroit was driving the questions that we were asking.

- Yeah.

- And so we started with, I mean, really hundreds of indicators and whittled them down and then turned... And whittled them down, guided by input from community development organizations and other stakeholders so that the questions that ended up in the survey, the resident survey, are the questions that really reflect the priorities of the city.

So that was unique also.

- Yeah, yeah, what is it that you imagine the use is for this?

I mean, there's some obvious applications for it, but let's talk about how this could help us solve some of the problems that we have, not just in neighborhoods, but in the city as a whole.

- Well, so for one thing, we wanna make sure that residents, funders, local government, everyone has access to timely information to make some decisions on, and also to use the information, you know, to really clarify some areas where people may not be clear.

So, just as an example, there are some questions on the survey around safety.

And we know that, often, people's perceptions of safety, especially in urban areas, people tend to feel less safe than they actually are.

So we're pairing together resident perception with actual safety data, so people can see.

And this will be, you know, powerful information for people to have.

We want and are hoping that community development organizations are able to use this data to complement data that they have as they're making decisions about priorities and what to do in their neighborhoods.

Local government, city of Detroit doing the same thing.

Foundations as they're thinking about making investments will be guided by this.

So we're really hopeful, and that's why we're trying to make a big splash around the launch of the tool, because now the data's there.

And so people just need to go to nvidetroit.org and they can see the data.

- Yeah, yeah.

It's also divided by council districts, which I think... - Yes.

- Important for a couple reasons, but one of them is that...

I feel like we're still a little bit in the transition period (clears throat) for people to start thinking of themselves in the context of these districts.

And that structure is supposed to be there to make government in the city more responsive.

- Exactly, and so when they go to nvidetroit.org, at the top, they can click on Vitality Index and see the data either for the city as a whole, or as you just indicated by council district.

We are going to soon be embarking on the survey in the next couple of months for 2024.

And we're hoping to have enough data so that we can actually drill down to the Neighborhood Zones, 'cause there is a third layer here.

- Yeah.

- It's not here with the data right now, and so people will be able to drill down even further.

- So March is Women's History Month, and you have until the end of the month