Prototype Issue
Healthy City: LA’s Safety InterNet
By John Rosenthal
(page 1 of 1)Like many great innovations, Healthy City fills such an obvious need that you can’t imagine a time when it didn’t exist.
The website is a veritable 411 of city and county social services, linking together all of the various strands of the Los Angeles safety net. A vast maze of government bureaucracy has been streamlined into one handy resource.
Looking for an immigration lawyer in Inglewood? Go to Healthy City. After-school programs in Alhambra? Try Healthy City. Public assistance in Pacoima? Healthy City has the answers.
“I can’t say enough about it,” said Holly Priebe-Diaz, a social worker for the Los Angeles Unified School District. “It has everything we need to help families. It saves us literally hundreds of hours because it’s so comprehensive. I type in an address and it pulls up every resource I need in a 5-mile radius. It even tells me whether they take insurance and what bus to take to get there.”
“And it’s free,” she added.
The site is even more valuable when individuals need more than one social service, which is often the case. “People’s problems never come in neat packages,” said Dr. Jacquelyn McCroskey, a professor of child welfare at the USC School of Social Work and an adviser for Healthy City. “If you’ve got a family, you’ve got child care, school, elderly parent issues. No one agency has all the information to help families solve their problems.”
Until now, that is. Now, “When you walk through the door of one agency, it’s like walking through the door of a thousand agencies,” said John Kim, Healthy City’s project director.
Healthy City was originally created in 2003, but a mapping feature added in 2005 has made it doubly valuable in a region notorious for sprawl. Because the website knows the locations of every social service in the LA metropolitan area, it can also help public policymakers target specific needs right down to individual census tracts, ZIP codes and intersections. Dozens of elected officials, including the entire LA delegation to the State Assembly, have asked Healthy City to provide them with data about their constituencies.
Kim says Healthy City’s finest hour came when LA County was allocating $500 million for universal preschool. The money might have been divvied up so that each district received an identical share. But Healthy City’s mapping software found 16 different ZIP codes, each of which had more than 1,000 4-year-olds with no access to any local preschool programs. In the end, the neediest neighborhoods got larger slices of the pie.
Healthy City has even won approval from City Hall. “It’s a very helpful tool,” said LA City Councilman Bernard Parks. Elizabeth Diaz, an education policy analyst for the LA Mayor’s Office, agrees. “Their incredible maps ensure that our tax dollars are going where the need is.”
Healthy City’s independence and small scale have been critical to its success. The nonprofit agency employs only a few full-time employees and operates on private grants of just $500,000. “If this had been done by the city,” Kim said, “it would have cost millions.”
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