Understanding Levers to Reduce Poverty for Individuals and Communities

What are key ways to reduce poverty in communities? With funding from the Northwest Area Foundation, interdisciplinary researchers from the Evans School are working to understand what policies are most effective in communities that vary by urban-rural location, in terms of racial and ethnic diversity, and with regard to potential economic linkages with surrounding areas.

The five-year, $1.5 million 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.

Currently the project is focusing on five main questions:

• How can a deeper understanding of the causes and solutions for poverty motivate public interest in poverty alleviation?
• What are the factors associated with poverty trajectories of counties within the eight states served by the Northwest Area Foundation?
• What are the relationships among clusters of economic activity, regional economic health, social capital, and poverty?
• How does housing contribute to poverty reduction, and how do housing issues vary between rural and urban areas?
• How do different categorizations of rurality alter our understanding of the geography of poverty?

For more information on our research, view the complete list of our current research papers.

 
Community Vitality DataExplorer

The project makes available all of the economic, sociodemographic, social capital, environmental, cultural, and civic measures from over 100 different sources.  When appropriate, the database will be updated at least annually.  To browse descriptions of the indicators available from DataExplorer, visit our indicators page.  To download indicators, visit the DataExplorer.