Charlotte Kahn, Director, Boston Indicators Project, The Boston Foundation
Did you ever dare to hope that it would someday be possible to explore all out-of-school programs of interest to your child, refer a young person to a high quality program on the spur of the moment, or calculate new slots needed in a particular neighborhood to accommodate a rising number of youths? That day is finally dawning in Boston in the form of a new website and database -- dubbed the BOSTONavigator -- thanks to a deep and timely partnership among Boston After School & Beyond, the City of Boston, and BOSTnet.
As a data fanatic working to inform and drive change through data, I applaud the introduction of this wonderful new tool. With a few clicks of any computer with Internet connection -- we will be able to get detailed and up to date information about all out-of-school programming in Boston. In addition to acting as a centralized resource bank, BOSTONavigator will generate important data.
I remember eons ago – 1992 – when the Carole R. Goldberg Seminar and Boston Foundation released a report on child care in Boston. One of its key findings was the stunning lack of available data about children and youth – other than the decennial Census. This spurred the Boston Foundation and many others to develop new resources to understand and convey the status of Boston’s children.
For example, working with many City of Boston agencies, the state’s Public Health Department, Northeastern University and the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, the Boston Foundation released the Boston Children and Families Database in 1994. Each interested person received a clunky set of 8 floppy disks, enormous rolled up maps of Boston, a big sheet of acetate, and a grease pencil. While someone referred to this unwieldy bundle as “barefoot GIS,” it felt like progress to us.
That early effort eventually merged with the comprehensive, web-based Boston Indicators Project and the new online data repository and mapping website MetroBoston DataCommon. However, their data are drawn from public and administrative sources that take time to collect, aggregate, and disseminate. They are not designed to help a young person, parent or referring organization find up-to-date, detailed information about a specific program now.
That’s why BOSTONavigator is such a breakthrough and so important. Designed to sort information by type of out-of-school program, neighborhood, accessibility, age and so on, BOSTONavigator provides instant access to timely information about available out-of-school resources. And over the next few months, this information will be collected and analyzed to provide program planners, funders, policy makers and the media with information about levels of use, gaps in the range of programs offered, and unmet need. In that sense, BOSTONavigator is also a tool to help Mayor Thomas M. Menino fulfill his vision for Boston as a child-centered city.
There’s only one catch: BOSTONavigator will be only as good as we all make it. Its information won’t come from consistently gathered public data but through a shared commitment on the part of all youth-serving out-of-school programs to enter and update program information. The quality, completeness and timeliness of information in BOSTONavigator will drive its use. That may seem daunting to busy programs, but we all owe it to Boston children and youth to make BOSTONavigator all that it can be. And compared to the old ways of compiling and accessing resources, BOSTONavigator makes it a cake walk.