“We were stunned at just how robust PolicyMap was. It’s helped our grantees better understand their communities and the historic and current systems that challenge them.”
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Challenge
Before integrating PolicyMap, the Cities for Financial Empowerment Fund (CFE Fund) and its CityStart municipal partners relied on manually collecting local data on financial health and related indicators from various sources. This made it difficult to identify neighborhood-level disparities or build compelling, data-driven cases for policy change. The CFE Fund needed an easy-to-use, centralized platform to both support internal planning and help cities communicate community needs.
Solution
PolicyMap provided a transformative solution. With access to thousands of indicators, such as financial health, lending patterns, housing instability, and public health outcomes, cities could now explore local data with unprecedented clarity.Now, CityStart grantees use PolicyMap to identify disparities across neighborhoods, gather evidence to understand the scope of key issues, develop data-backed strategies to build resident financial stability, and support cross-departmental collaboration around financial empowerment solutions by sharing easy-to-understand maps and visualizations. Internally, the CFE Fund uses PolicyMap to better tailor support for each city and is exploring how consultants can help local leaders fully leverage the platform.
By integrating PolicyMap into its CityStart initiative, the CFE Fund has equipped municipal partners with the tools to visualize, explore, and communicate local financial challenges more effectively. PolicyMap enables the CFE Fund and its grantees to identify gaps, craft data-driven solutions, and build internal and external support for critical initiatives that can build resident financial stability and promote wealth equity.