With funding from the Northwest Area Foundation, interdisciplinary researchers from the Evans School are working to understand what poverty-reduction policies are most effective in communities.  The team is particularly interested in the effectiveness of poverty policies in different urban and rural contexts and for different racial and ethnic groups, and in relation to the local economic environment.

The five-year Community Vitality Project produces research papers that analyze the levers that both reduce poverty and enhance community vitality, with the goal of making recommendations for effective policies within the eight states that the Northwest Area Foundation serves: Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Iowa. The project supports a web-user interface to make available all of the economic, sociodemographic, social capital, environmental, cultural, and civic measures from over 100 different sources.

For more information, visit our project overview, and explore the resources available on our website, including the DataExplorer and our working research papers.