(Inactive) Metropolitan Chicago Information Center

We are sad to report that Metropolitan Chicago Information Center (MCIC) closed in February 2012, after more than 20 years of serving the Chicago community.  We’re grateful for all that MCIC has contributed to NNIP over the years.   We are fortunate to still have a very strong partner in the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, as well as the MacArthur Foundation’s commitment to strengthening Chicago’s broader information infrastructure.

Institutional Setting

The Metro Chicago Information Center (MCIC) is an independent nonprofit organization founded in 1990. MCIC is a neutral third party expert committed to generating strategic information that improves local and regional economic and quality of life conditions in communities. While it has also worked on city and regional strategies, community development has always been an important part of its portfolio.

MCIC has steadily maintained a membership base of about 200 organizations, about 100 of which are organizations involved in community participation in community planning that use MCIC data and technical support for needs assessments, strategic plans, funding proposals, public education / advocacy reports, evaluations, and mandated inventories of service needs and/or assets in their catchment areas.

MCIC maintains capacities for:

Facilitation of Development Plans - Facilitated discussion with community development staff and community residents on the details/status of development plans, either anticipated or in progress, including "emergency" assessment of deals that appear to be in trouble or that have hit a major barrier.

Communication Tools for NCP Agencies - MCIC maintains an advanced, continuously updated information system on neighborhood conditions that is the basis for community workshops and PowerPoint presentations by local agencies on content areas such as: status of housing, demographic trends, local market analysis, commercial trends and how to recruit businesses. MCIC is a primary partner in the Northeast Illinois Planning Commission (NIPC) efforts to build a multi-source virtual data warehouse for the Chicago region.

Community Surveys. MCIC's survey capacity meets all requirements, from large-scale surveys with professional interiewing and scientific sample quality control, to local community information projects such as intercept surveys to determine shopping patterns or local business plans. MCIC conducts evaluation studies to compare costs and benefits of data collection strategies. For 13 years MCIC conducted a regional quality-of-life survey.

Our information system on neighborhood conditions expanded markedly in 2002 when MCIC was selected to be the data intermediary to serve the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's long-term, 16 neighborhood, New Communities Program (NCP) - already noted for its resident led "Quality of Life Planning" approach website:http://www.newcommunities.org/ . MCIC is substantially expanding its holdings of neighborhood level data to do this work, and is tasked with preparing maps, tabulations, and reports to determine the patterns of neighborhood change associated with the NCP work. LISC's publication "Measuring Community Development: An Emerging Approach to Quantifying Neighborhood Revitalization" is a summary of MCIC work that is the forerunner of this activity (available on MCIC website at: www.mcic.org ).

MCIC is funded largely through work with local foundations, local governments and other area nonprofits. We have maintained our commitment to serve smaller, community organizations even while the philanthropic underwriting for these activities has decreased. We have done this by leveraging our data base resources, and other organizational capacities (survey design and administration, focus groups) to undertake about to 100 custom research projects per year that generate revenues which subsidize services to smaller, community organizations and the other public benefits we provide.