Rockford LAC Kick Off Meeting

Objectives: To meet to discuss review of the toolkit, profiles, next steps, and action items.

  1. How does this align/not align with what you know about your community?
  2. How does this data help you start shaping your goals?
  3. What additional information do you need to inform your decisions?
  • Members discussed the data largely in alignment.
  • One point which was noted is the percentage of renter-occupied housing in the Housing Occupancy estimates seems to be lower. Renters in Rockford are significantly higher than 41% at 70-80% especially in the west and south side areas for colored communities.
  • Members discussed and noted how does this data helps to start shaping goals and additional information is needed includes:
  • What is the data on equity of lack thereof in these communities?
  • What are the school districts like in these communities?
  • What is the data on expulsion and suspensions of black and brown children?
  • Root cause of violent crime is inequity and marginalized and de-resourced populations in these communities. It would be useful to have data around where those gaps are.
  • IDJJ or IDOC data on commitments or census based on gun violence. What are the rates of commitment for juveniles and adults coming from this area and how many of those were gun related offenses?
  • Breaking down the data by census tracts would be helpful because data on the whole city might be skewed. This will also help zero on and align the target areas for research and programming.
  • It would be interesting to look at trends over time of the data (instead of static data).
  • Knowing the rate of out of school youth and demographic break-up of the individuals who make up the percentage of out of school youth would be useful.