Family Well-being in NYC Communities in the context of COVID-19

The New York City Center for Innovation through Data Intelligence (CIDI) and NYC’s Agency for Children’s Services (ACS) tasked the Capstone team to assess the impact of and response to the COVID-19 crisis in neighborhoods of New York City. Part of the project consisted of updating Community Profiles that ACS created a couple of years ago to help local stakeholders with strategic planning. These profiles provide detailed data on different domains such as education, health and well-being, economic assets, cultural and social connections, child welfare and juvenile justice for eleven communities/neighborhoods of NYC. Aside from updating the data, the team also collected data for prior years to give ACS a historical baseline and to make it possible to see trends over time.

The second part of the project focused on data that was collected by the Department of Health and Medical Hygiene on the COVID pandemic (cases, deaths, testing rates) and analyzed how the communities of East Harlem, East New York and Elmhurst were impacted by COVID-19. An in-depth analysis was carried out on these three neighborhoods, trying to tie together the socio-economic and cultural data provided by the profiles and data on how COVID has affected these neighborhoods. This in-depth research has provided the team to conclude crucial findings into a complex final report that outlined vital information from vaccine skepticism to socio-economic disparities in neighborhoods of NYC. The final report had been designed to help better understand why these neighborhoods were affected the way they were, with the ultimate goal of providing local policymakers with information that will enable them to respond to the needs of their neighborhoods and help them recover from the effects of the pandemic.