2003: Launch of Healthy City to help communities map areas of need

After civil rights attorneys Molly Munger, Steve English and Connie Rice won Godinez v. Davis, and with it the redirection of almost $1 billion in school construction bond funds toward the Los Angeles Unified School District, they realized data mapping could help even the stakes for communities combating unfair systems. 

At that time, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) was celebrating its centennial and setting its priorities moving forward. CHLA identified the need for public access to information on available resources as its most pressing public health issue, reaching out to Catalyst California (then Advancement Project California) as a leader in public data mapping and access. 

The goal was to digitize the Los Angeles County Social Services Rainbow Resource Directory, a guide for wrap-around services beyond medical needs. In 2003, this became the founding project of Healthy City, an initiative to help community organizations access, map and work with data to advance policies to fulfill community needs. Identifying areas that offered few or no services to communities of color would help in the push for more equitable policies. 

“For years, we made regular presentations to train social workers and other professionals on how to use this technology and how to add their own information to the data base,” said Chris Ringewald, Senior Director of Research and Data Analysis at Catalyst California, who helped manage the data for the program. “By 2009, we had the biggest open data base of its kind in the state.” 

Another aspect of the project, then called the Community Research Lab, allowed advocates to train themselves and others with tutorials on community-based research to strengthen their arguments for more equitable policies. At one point a dedicated team of 18 people worked on the effort. The HealthyCity.org website shared resources and tools with more than 56,000 visitors annually, and the team hosted training sessions and workshops for almost 3,000 community advocates. 

“Healthy City was part of a data mapping zeitgeist that was taking hold across the country,” said John Kim, President and CEO of Catalyst California, who as the organization’s first chief executive shepherded Healthy City’s launch and growth. “We just organized the data and brought people along so they could use it across California.”  

When the California Endowment designed its Building Healthy Communities program, it came to Healthy City to select the areas that could most benefit from it. And First 5 LA, the early education initiative, used Healthy City to pick the initial areas that would participate in Best Start, its effort to help young children thrive by investing in disenfranchised communities. Today, it serves 14 geographic areas in Los Angeles County.  

And during the 2010 census, Healthy City helped with outreach to hard-to-count communities, resulting in the redirection of $3.3 billion in federal funds. 

Healthy City also helped track car impoundment by Los Angeles police, a practice that squeezed undocumented residents who could not qualify for a valid driver’s license, but then had to pay thousands of dollars to retrieve their towed cars. The resulting activism prompted an internal policy change in 2011 that ended the singling out of immigrants. 

“It’s a fairness issue,” then-police chief Charlie Beck told the Los Angeles Times. “There is a vast difference between someone driving without a license because they cannot legally be issued one and someone driving after having their license revoked.” 

By 2015, Healthy City had helped major foundations in their strategic planning by identifying needs in the communities they serve and promoting decision making driven by data. As the Godinez decision had done with public school construction funds, this new tool now drove millions of private dollars to areas with the greatest need across California. 

Over time, other organizations learned from Healthy City and set up their own data mapping platforms with its technology. Today, Healthy City would be one of many initiatives supporting low-income communities of color through resource mapping. Catalyst California has sunsetted the site and shifted its efforts to more direct support of advocates with its RaceCounts.org website, the only such website measuring racial disparities in every California city and county with a population of at least 10,000. 

“HealthyCity.org was Google Maps before Google Maps was invented,” Ringewald said. “We’re proud that it was developed for social justice, and that we continue to develop innovative tools for social justice to make social change happen.”