Grand Rapids

Institutional Setting

The Community Research Institute (CRI) at Grand Valley State University is a partnership of the Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy and the Grand Rapids Community Foundation (GRCF). CRI's mission is to assist nonprofit organizations with the acquisition of information and technical skills that will help them understand the evolving needs of the community, document these needs for grant applications, and measure the success of programs in West Michigan.

In the 1990's Dr. Donna Van Iwaarden, faculty member at the School of Public and Nonprofit Administration (SPNA) at Grand Valley State University (GVSU) produced a document that summarized data about the Greater Grand Rapids area under the name "Community Data Initiative" (CDI). In 2001, with funding from the GRCF, Dr. Van Iwaarden and a newly appointed CRI Research Fellow and SPNA faculty member - Dr. Mark Hoffman, began evolving the CDI into an organization called CRI creating what she dubbed a "data - sharehouse."

Since then, CRI has been building its capacity to support the data - sharehouse concept, or Community Information Systems (CIS) by acquiring key data sets including census, housing, crime, voting, vital records, and public assistance information to help support the work of nonprofit organizations. Today, CRI areas of work include:

Program Evaluation Services:

Evaluation services assist organizations in assessing program effectiveness. Specifically:

• Developing an evaluation design and measures to determine whether a program in having its intended impact

• Designing data collection forms and procedures, and databases to capture and record data collected

• Analyzing data and presenting results and conclusions from the findings

A Community Information System:

CRI is committed to building a growing "data-sharehouse" for neighborhoods and the region. Specifically,

• Creating partnerships with community organizations to monitor changing local and regional social conditions

• Disseminating information and reports through its website, always with consideration for privacy of individuals and households

• Documenting information about data to increase community awareness on local, state, and federal sources of information and ways in which it can be used

University resource:

CRI also provides opportunities for Grand Valley's faculty, staff and students. Specifically:

• Promoting the use of CRI services and tools among university research staff and faculty for research purposes

• Providing internships to students from public administration, criminal justice, social work, geography, and information science that focus on how to document and analyze a variety of data sets and apply different technologies for community analysis