The Family Life Center of St. Stephen church in Oak Creek provides food, clothing and services for families in need. Its coordinator, Lynn Kaestner, wanted to know where poverty was most concentrated in the nine south side ZIP codes of its service area.
Meanwhile, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee student Garrett Knuth and his classmates in Criminal Justice 520 wanted to learn how to use geographical information system (GIS) mapping tools.
It was a natural match, so the Family Life Center and students in Assistant Professor’s Aleksandra Snowden’s class collaborated on a 2015 spring semester service learning project. The result: GIS maps that are now helping the center, and a model for similar class projects underway in the spring 2016 semester, including collaborations with the Milwaukee Police Department and the Silver Spring Community Center.
“I wanted to offer the class the opportunity to solve real-world problems, not just give them assignments and tests,” said Snowden, who learned of the Family Life Center through Laurie Marks, executive director of UWM’s Center for Community-Based Learning, Leadership and Research.
The Family Life Center GIS project was one of several that Snowden’s class worked on in spring 2015. Because poverty tends to be more hidden in metro Milwaukee’s south side than the city’s other areas, Kaestner said, the GIS map could help the center more effectively target its resources. In addition to running a food pantry and clothing bank, the center provides educational workshops, parent workshops, support groups and other services to help people eventually support themselves.
Students worked with Kaestner to pinpoint the mapping goals and process, then the students went to work. “They left it up to us to determine ways to show poverty in those ZIP codes,” said Knuth, now a grad student who aspires to a career in crime analysis.
Knuth and classmates Taylor Green and Brady Hammerer (both of whom have graduated) asked several questions. Which ZIP codes had the most married couples and families of four making less than $10,000 a year? Which had the most individuals below the federal poverty level. Which had the most residents using food stamps?
To build the map, they used U.S. Census data from the nine target ZIP codes and information from the American Community Survey, as well as the location of existing food pantries. The highest concentrations of poverty were in Cudahy and St. Francis, while South Milwaukee and Greenfield had high numbers of people “very below” or “extremely below” the poverty line.
With this general picture in hand, the Family Life Center is more efficient in its outreach efforts, and now wants to learn more about communities on the neighborhood and street levels. “We now know where more help is needed, where we need to be focusing our information, and we’re also able to direct people to resources closer to where they live,” Kaestner said.
As for the students, they learned the importance of the Family Life Center’s work in geographic areas where they thought there wasn’t much poverty. It also reinforced their classroom lessons, and laid a foundation for more projects. “Making the maps really helped us strengthen the skills we’d learned during the semester,” said Knuth.
Now, Snowden’s Criminal Justice 520 students are helping other community agencies with GIS needs. There’s a project with the Milwaukee Police Department to map changing crime levels around UWM in recent years, and one with the Silver Spring Community Center to map bus stops, pharmacies and grocery stores in its area. Others include collaborations with the International Institute of Wisconsin, Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood and IMPACT Inc.
