San Antonio

Community Information Now (CI:Now) is a partnership of over 25 public, private, governmental, educational and healthcare organizations working together since 1998 to provide to the community a network for finding, learning, imagining, sharing, telling, and joining for positive change. The unincorporated organization has three primary and interwoven capacities:

• NOWData is an online datacenter and data services provider administered by the University of Texas School of Public Health, San Antonio Regional Campus, and supported by the NOWData Working Group comprised of local data providers and data users.
• NOWCastSA is an independent, online-only community news organization, dedicated to local, public service journalism and to creating a neighbor-to-neighbor news and information network in the San Antonio community. It is funded by grants from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and from CI:Now and is administered by the San Antonio Area Foundation.
• NOWTech is a collection of local resources that help adults learn how to use computers and the internet to improve their lives and those of their families.

CI:Now is governed by a Policy Group composed of representatives of CI:Now funders and other stakeholder organizations. The Policy Group serves as the locus for overall strategic planning and progress measurement, high-level coordination of activities among the three CI:Now arms, branding and messaging for community relations, resource development, and fiscal stewardship.

CI:Now serves Bexar (San Antonio ) and 11 surrounding counties (Atascosa, Bandera, Comal, Frio, Gillespie, Guadalupe, Karnes, Kendall, Kerr, Medina, and Wilson) in south-central Texas, near the U.S.-Mexico border. This 11,391 square mile area is home to an ethnically diverse population of over two million persons living in settings ranging from highly urban to rural and scarcely populated. While covering the full 12-county area with county- and zip-code level data, CI:Now works to make small-area (e.g., block group or parcel-level) data accessible wherever those data are available.

CI:Now supports both general and focused community information needs. On one track, CI:Now gathers, processes, and engages the broader community around data and stories of perennial and general interest, such as poverty and child immunization rates. On a parallel track, CI:Now responds to the information needs of targeted change-oriented initiatives or topical focus areas. Examples include the Eastside Promise Neighborhood planning grant (www.eastsidepromise.org), the SA 2020 visioning process (www.SA2020.org), and the local scarcity of mental health and substance abuse data.