American Community Survey: Where Do We Go From Here? Framing Paper

USING THE 5-YEAR AMERICAN COMMUNITY SURVEY 8:30 – 10:00, Friday morning

Given the complexity of the ACS, we have included sessions on using the 5-Year data in previous two NNIP meetings. However, partners and communities continue to struggle with the data and the demand for further discussion and information continues. It is important that NNIP and its partners be able to use the ACS and assist city agencies and community organizations in understanding the data, because it plays an essential role in the geographic distribution of federal resources. As Andrew Reamer reports in his study of this distributive role of the ACS, “In FY2008, 184 federal domestic assistance programs used ACS-related datasets to help guide the distribution of $416 billion, 29 percent of all federal assistance."

Please see the NNIP ACS Resources handout and the NNIP website for more detail on what we covered in previous sessions. In this session in the Detroit meeting we propose to extend this discussion in a more focused way to suggest strategies that NNIP partners can use to make ACS data understandable and useful in their communities.