The Neighborhood Legal Needs
& Resources Project

For the past three decades, Professor López has insisted that we need sophisticated and manageable methods for assessing both the problems faced by and resources available to low-income, of color, and immigrant communities. The legal and non-legal offices, organizations, coalitions, and networks that serve these communities must learn – at least if we are to do our job as well as we should – to document and analyze what problems clients face and, simultaneously, what help they together might find to address these problems. Such research is anything but “academic” or “one shot” or a “luxury.” In our view, studies of this sort must become part of “business as usual” and united with street delivery of services.

Since 1999, in partnership with the Center for Urban Epidemiologic Studies (CUES), we have led a multidisciplinary team in conducting the Neighborhood Legal Needs & Resources Project (NLN&RP) – a sweeping study in Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, and English of problems and resources in Harlem, East Harlem, Chinatown, the Lower East Side, Bushwick, and Bed-Stuy. Relying principally on a sophisticated telephone survey of 2,000 residents and intensive in-person interviews of more than 1,000 service providers, we have the following aims:

Phase One – Information Gathering: Collect comprehensive information about problems residents face, where they go for help, and how they regard the help they get.

Phase Two – Data Analysis: Analyze the rich data residents and service providers have collaborated with us to generate.

Phase Three – Information Sharing: Team up with those who live and work in these neighborhoods and with a wide assortment of others to share, put to use, and mobilize around what we have learned.

Phase Four – Distribution of Tool Kit and Guide: Make available what we learn and how we learned it to those in New York City, across the country, and in international circles interested in studies such as the NLN&RP and its critical role in developing effective problem-solving systems.

In June 2003, we completed our telephone survey of 2,000 residents. Already we have learned extraordinary amounts from these interviews. We’re now in the midst of running qualitative and quantitative analyses of the data collected through our surveys with residents and service providers. At the same time, we continue our march to complete the outreach side of Phase One, combining intense background research and a daily slate of outreach interviews to close in on our goals.

Meanwhile, we keep drawing on everyone – from residents to hip-hop artists to ad executives – about how best to share and organize around what we have learned. Ultimately, through a variety of formats and languages, we will share the information gathered to inform and galvanize the many constituencies implicated in the quality of problem solving in New York City’s low-income, of color, and immigrant communities. And we shall make widely available the NLN&RP plan and instruments and further explore its potential for improving everyday and long-term problem solving.