Lec 8 MIT 11.945 Springfield Studio, Fall 2005

first you may have noticed we have some guests here from the brightwood health center so maybe it'd be useful first just I don't know how much you know about what what this class is about so I thought we'd take a few minutes just to talk about that and what you introduce yourselves and then go into the course and session today so this is the Springfield studio which witch season McDowell has been teaching I guess this is the third year third year third year part of the Center for effective community practices you know 10 year engagement with the North End community and what we've tried to do with this class is tailor it to what our priorities for the local community and build the content around projects that the community is interested in so this year we're focusing on an economic development plan for the North End neighborhood working with the campus committee you know which is a cup which is a sort of coalition of variety of agencies community groups in the community and working with them on an economic development plan and we've sort of taken the first part we only to work on sort of evaluating options and trying to reach consensus with the campus committee and sort of what the agenda driving the economic development plan should be and then the second half of the course will be more about developing recommendations around around that plan so that's a very quick overview so maybe with that my name is karl friedrich by the way I'm the co-instructor with Cesar and I'm Cesar go I just introduced myself to everyone and the only thing I wanted to add to a call said about the course is you can have like three different modes of operating here we have sometimes when we have these sessions that really lecture discussions sometimes the real work sessions where people are just out here with papers and numbers and pens and doing things and then sometimes it's people out in the community and today is one of those things we'll be doing much more about kind of lecture discussion because folks are out in the community last week in the head some stuff to report back on and there's some other things of our agenda that car look over but the other thing I wanted to say is that every year we try have folks who have been doing the work that you're doing kind of come and sit in our class and we see this not as just the first opportunity we see this is the first opportunity maybe they have connections with you as we go throughout the year and hope to see you again either here or out there and what to pull a new as a resource as we kind start to work through the efforts of this course and with that when we just all go around say who we are with though I work for MIT OpenCourseWare and I only working with this class to get across materials put it on the web and be able to access all the church in this class it is spray I mean i'm tina Furcal on the third-year resident internal medicine for this whole month all of us are sort of at Briarwood for the entire month doing a lot of different work so I think there's two other times that we're supposed to sort of tina's come out here there were supposed to participate when you guys actually come out like this one go I'm here and you care and also up there dear internal medicine I'm going the equity on the second chance as well a new things this month as he gets noble and your community for us at the health center so the idea for us companies just another promise the medical problems don't work so I'll and also the chops for us well I thought we try and cover three things today one has been the first part of the class debriefing on the interviewing that was done last week or and any other pressing project issues that students may need to discuss then the second part I'm going to try and talk through some of the analytical tools that may prove helpful as you better understand the economic opportunities and issues in the community I know there's a lot of reading for this class and I you know a lot of that was there and not necessarily to have to read for today but also to have as a resource for you so you have some examples of different approaches to the analysis that you can use going forward and then the third part is is really looking at some of the reflection tools that the Center for reflective community practice uses and how you might be able to apply that to some of the work we're doing in the north end yeah yeah I mean I sort of see this first phase is sort of consolidating what you've learned and sort of you know proposing what you think the agenda the economic development plan that you're going to work on is you know sort of trying to sort through these sort of four areas that we've divided up into and and so to say either you know we think the most pressing needs and the best opportunities around building the plan around Bay State or building it around Main Street or building around workforce development or some combination of those I think it's really trying to sort of share what you've learned what your assessment of the community and the broader opportunity environment are is to to make some proposals about sort of what the what the sort of focus of the plan is going to be so there's some consensus and support from the community about the direction you're going in and you have an opportunity to sort of go forward working on a plan that you've discussed with them and and they understand what the focus and priorities are going to be so I think I think that's really what we should be shooting for and i agree i think there needs to be there needs to be a lot of dialogue about that you know we'll have to see how much time you need somewhere between a half an hour and 45 minutes i certainly wouldn't go along we definitely that might break out I guess it's not totally clear how much speaks for everyone but she really gave the impression that there really expecting with the focus of the plan to be around the campus no I don't think that that's what warrant or be fun but I think it won't prevent it we're willing to keep that in mind and their frame of reference that I mean through campus committee like their whole reason for being that's like I want to do this all I think about it it's high on their list of things that they think about so when we talk about the phone either to be thinking about how does this relate because this would came to like why does it not release the campus but it still going to make a suggestion on that front for you the campus committee has set up a work group for this for the business plan you know to work with this committee and I would really suggest that before that meeting on the 20th that some communication goes to that work group and that work group has a responsibility of connecting the work to the campus I think you shouldn't take that on I think you should take on what you're focused on and work with the work group and tell them you can say very clearly to them this you've been talking with people you've seen to some you know maybe some misunderstanding or uncertainty about how this connects to the goal of the campus community and let them carry that that message for you and it keeps you kind of on task and they're not engaged in how the committee as a whole is thinking about this because that's really their charge yeah I think it's probably also a good idea to in the update and maybe maybe you could do a brief written update for the median for the phone conversation with note that every week we not something elaborate but you know maybe just a one-page outline where you are what you're doing and asked you to distribute that to the broader campus committee so that you don't end up with all with milta having one truth of work right and it not you know sort of being shared by the campus committee so I would try and get to get your thinking out to that whole committee as it evolved up to spin feels like the first time before we went there how did you describe the group that you were expecting coming in what is the perception of us as I heard very different things about what our training and departmental affiliation is people have asked us if we welcome to social service agency will be a Social Work school there are those who think that we have some heavy design engineering skills so I think they know about well clearly an hour meeting we laid out you know who we are what we do in a way that I think it's consistent with what everybody else here as things were doing what I think you're running into is an issue where there's not a lot of communication from that meeting to other people and so people are mapping whatever previous notions they had ideas about the class last year any other intersection they may have had with MIT and RNA University and what they're doing they're just kind of mapping onto that yeah and I mean were there were sort of we've had two meetings with representatives of the client but you know those meetings were far apart they're all sorts of other stuff going on so I'm not sure even the campus committee has promised to their mind right a really good understanding of what we're doing but the basic you know the basic framework was this is an economic development plan we're going to we're going to take the first half to look at some of the years the community has some of the opportunities that we see in the community propose an agenda spend the second half of the semester developing that agenda so that was the basic framework so but I think and I think it does suggest that in October 20th but you might have to take the first part of the presentation to sort of refresh people's memory yeah about what the project is what your charge is and now let's not take that as a given I think it also have described would you consider our own strengths we're not that's right right and yeah and you're you nine people with a limited amount of time limited background so but you do have to sort of manage expectations about what they're going to get out of the project and I think that's a big part of that meeting you know building consensus about what the community what you in the community see is what you're going to produce out of this class what she said because we just say I mean beyond just being like can't be social focus I choose funnel focus of our economic we're talking I think we interpreted this right there like we're some athletes well being this an incubator space we think about it emanating from the campus itself and we're talking about stalls or push carts they'd be like better just like to describe you that you know our plans incorporate physical space into it yeah yeah yeah well it strikes me that in all the interviews everyone has an institutional agenda that you are coming up against you know and i think you have you have to be sensitive if you have to be aware of that but not necessarily with that we do to your conclusions you know bay state has a certain agenda the city has a certain agenda awesome Noah has his is end everyone you're talking to has their own their own vantage point and agenda and I think it's important for you not that not to be captured by that I mean to sort of understand what that how that might be valuable to what we're trying to achieve but but I think your client is is is not just the campus committee in the sort of physical sense of the campus committee it's it's the campus mitte as a vehicle to improve the economic development outcomes and capacity of the North End community so I think you have to sort of separate out what might be an immediate agenda item for the campus committee versus what you see is the most you know the most critical areas to sort of focus on so I don't I wouldn't wouldn't necessarily take what milta said as sort of you know what should what should be what you drive your recommendations at this point that I think I mean it certainly is certainly something to be thinking about it's certainly an important resource that you could draw upon but I wouldn't necessarily have that shape your agenda at this point I think it's a little early to sort of take that view is necessarily the the primary I I think most of us don't want to really use the campus but I think we really have to explain why why that's not the answer actually I see a little bit in the campus there after the campus is a great resource however I think it's just incumbent on us to explain that there's only so much that any given resource can achieve and so if they are expecting to come out of a certain level of poverty maximum utilization of the Capitals the physical resource is not going to achieve that but it can be used in something ways that they've talked about the training space an incubator space it's great to free about and my impression is that actually more of that is happening than God if not the this underground strip tender Peter school is being used by other agencies a lot of a training program so they're doing it and I think that we can build a case without being confrontational bit more of the same as is possible but it's not a panacea Main Street but I think if you did decide factory outside the campus now it's not the inner part of the outer part there's big phase there that that can use them I think a bit a big challenge on knocking over 20th is how you sort of frame that the issues for the campus committee so and I think that's you know I think we're sort of ahead of ourselves there I mean that's going to be a big issue I think there's still a little I think you're still sort of in the throes of research in the community and doing some sort of analysis to sort of uncover what you think of the critical opportunity so I think we're going to come back to that next week as we begin to digest what you had and think about how to present it to the community so how you decide to sort of frame the agenda for the community and then you know that it might be framed around the resource it might be framed around around some other set of issues you are probably going to come back and refer back to the campus and to other assets in the community but you know I think it's I think we're so a little early to sort of know how we're going to end up framing this I think you appear still we're still sort of investigating a little bit but that that how you sort of set this up and and how you sort of help and I think it's important to sort of see your role as not as as you know potentially open up the communities thinking about the issues and opportunities in the neighborhood not not only staying with what they're thinking is now but but providing this an opportunity to to get them to ask some questions they might not have asked or to think about what are critical issues in a new way so you might choose to frame it in the way that's different than how that about things now or you might decide that we really have to we have to you know frame it in a way that connects with what they're thinking is but I think that's the discussion we're going to be having next week but just two of the points because one related to this whole thing to campus oh I think in terms of how you handle it and how you handle people's conversation about it a you know really requires an understanding of what is it represent for the community and what that investment it is and I think there is a lot of that in school and everything kind of really represents for the community that's a beyond just kind of like can we make use of this space that it's really holding a whole set of emotions at a whole set of other things for the full folks in the community and for a number of the people who are part of it in the committee so we're paying attention to happen trying to understand that that way can help you then kind of negotiate it the other question I want to ask is what you just real quickly push the next set of interviews you're doing I just want to check in real quick because I think they're still with some left off if you're doing those this week by phone and stuff I think it was Herbie and okay but we don't have to go into the law I just want to make sure that you were still moving on them for this week probably avoiding the brownies yeah I mean I think you certainly want to get the other campus committee members you haven't spoken to that that's a really important yeah and her me well Herbie they keep them be exactly to continue to grow that has to put any words to thank the benefits of them they can't use like the bakery and they will know already that how they see how can they grow getting them involved we got a group started to build a small in size and started to have some basements and of what's going on it probably because I think meeting with cows yes fly ball before we go out no yeah Carla and I don't want to go into the kind of discussion that right yet because we do have some more particulars on that but I think you're right there Carlos is one of those people for particularly I reason we need to interview and American age of the priorities are engaging the campus community is there any sort of important stakeholders in segments of the community that you haven't engaged to speak with that's pretty important it does strike me that there's probably some interviewing with more force than all my magic at least an education and training system that you probably need it you've gotten to a state's perspective on it some other perspective but thank you you've gotta get and there's one name that came up on this list that you handed out that I think it would be important for you I didn't we didn't have before this Bob Moloch because you know what building they're talking about you guys you know it's the one that's right at the end end of the community where the nightclub used to be oh what's a call listen name of that club it used to be no it's not on main street it's on the road that goes that the goes to the bridge to west springfield it's just where you get to the bridge and there's a no rascal no mrs. political there's a big building there whereas those hours out of it it's a big building that used to be a club that's all being torn down and they're building a gas station the store and everything and this is a guy who's doing in and people from the bright Woodside and looking forward to that as a destination for shopping and so so I think knowing something about that business and what impact it may have other things going to be very important and I actually thought to him they were well along but it sounds like they're maybe even some option to have some impact on that so I think he might be an important person so so you know we have thursday suicide that's also I hope at the end of this class to give out some sort of analytical assignments now support some of the work you're doing lots of what we're going to talk about today so you'll you know also have some other information sure sure sure yeah I mean I have a lot of content but I don't have to go through a non-black it also post this stellar and people think some of these techniques are feeling are relevant so what I wanted to do is sort of give a little bit overview of some of the economic analyses that are used as you think about her life's then he's going to be relevant and applicable to some of the play anymore renewing first base now this is sort of defining your study area I think that's already been done for us we know what the geography the north end is but often an understanding you know geography it's it's important to have some basis of comparison so it might be useful to think about you know a little bit do we want to understand north end in the context of the city of Springfield is that most important to us do we want to understand it in the context of the Springfield metropolitan area is that more important to us in terms of a better understanding the economy and economic relationship so it might be you think a little bit about you know whether we're we're under we care more about the relationship of the north end the Springfield over all the water meter or perhaps both and I've sort of put together that's a laundry list of some of the analytical approaches you know demographic analysis really understanding the population in the neighborhood understanding the economy which such sort of broken down into these two approaches an economic performance analysis you know how well is the economy serving residents in the community how well are they benefiting from it and that's more oriented towards the people as opposed to an economic structure analysis or economic patien alisis is really kind of understanding what's the composition and the growth trends of the economy and what does that suggest about employment opportunities business expansion opportunity and then looking more specifically at retail market analysis that's that some more focused analysis that's really about understanding retail demand than supply for retail stores and that may be particularly relevant here either if we do development or how long my microphone either if we're doing development or along Main Street or if we want to think about retail business development among entrepreneurs are helping existing businesses grow and then more broadly real estate market analysis not so much retail but if you have a vacant property or trying to look at what our potential uses for it how can you just some of that analysis and then lastly and this is in some ways I think one of the more important elements is what I call resource base analysis really understanding the resources in the community and region and how well those are really serving your economic development agenda so let me kind of walk through some of this fairly quickly first in terms of working with economic data I don't know if you've already covered this in statistics but it's an important point I want to make you can just pass this out and that's the distinction between household based data and establishment based at our people familiar with that distinction if you can not in your head or some people not let me do this pretty quickly you know household based at it really gives you economic information on by place of residence and this is really primarily census data but it tells you you know what is the population and characteristics of the population one of income poverty rates educational attainment and the like and it's really a profile of the people and who lived there and and that's pretty important for both retail market analysis and the economic performance analysis the major source of data especially once you get at a neighborhood level as the census you know other sources like the current population survey poverty estimates local area and unemployment typically operate on a state county or city level you can't really get neighborhood level data so from the most part we're going to be limited to census data in profiling the North End's itself establishment based data is about place of employment it's data collected from employers and it really relates to the employment number of establishment sales and output of businesses and that that may have an impact on the residents or it may not have an impact on the residents you know you could have you could have a hundred thousand jobs in a place but that doesn't mean the residents living in that place actually are employed in those jobs and so it's important to understand that distinction the household based data is really profiling the workforce from a labor market point of view and the establishment based data is really profiling the type of jobs available in that area and you know there are a number of data sources for establishment based data all of which have differences associated with them probably the most red oval source of data is what's called the es 202 data series that's from the employment uninsurance fun employers have to report for unemployment insurance a lot of data gets collected there one of the limitations of that data is it doesn't pick up self-employed people or informal enterprises current employment statistics don't really go beyond the state of metropolitan level so they're less helpful for you the economic census is produced every five years so it's West current but one of the nice advantages of the economic census is it actually gives you output data and sales data as opposed to just employment and wage data another important source is the bureau of labor statistics which has very detailed occupational data and I think that's going to be important for workforce development work which we can talk about here I think the problem with all of the establishment based data is it is there's almost no sub city level data really the only secondary data source that the government produces is County business patterns produces zip code based data on establishments and employment by size class you could get zip code base data most of the other sub city establishment based data that you find is his private sector you know like reference USA dun & bradstreet and you know I'd say my experience with that is you can start with that data but there's a lot of in accuracy and a lot of incompleteness in that data so you I wouldn't take that as a given if you're going to use that data I would verify it locally because there can often be a lot of a lot of errors certainly in Dun & Bradstreet data that I've work with is there's a lot of errors so anyway the other so I won't talk that much about demographic analysis you know I think we have some of this information already it does strike me though that the employment status and obstacles to employment or a big issue in this neighborhood and it's probably worth someone looking at the at least what the census data provides to get that sort of picture you know what is and there's a fair amount of data at the census both in terms of labor force participation but you also can get employment by industry and employment by occupation so you can get some background and you could even get a breakdown of now with some retake for data you get a breakdown of that but by race and ethnicity so I think that's going to be an important issue to look at probably important to do some of that analysis sooner rather than later might also be important to look at the extent of self-employment that's reported on the census it's probably not completely accurate for the neighborhood but you know you should have a sense of at least what people are formally reporting as their self employment activity as well so that's sort of the demographic analysis economical performance analysis here you know you're really trying to look at how well is the neighborhood is the economy really forming for the residents that live in that area and and how well is the local community participating in and benefiting from what's happening at the city and regional economy level and there are you know number of measures that can get used for this including you know is is the area growing are people getting employment what are their earnings level one of their income and poverty rates and also you know how are they benefiting in terms of new economic activity from birth sperm deaths new development and new investment I don't think we probably need to spend a lot of time on this issue i think the sort of economic conditions in the neighborhood you know fairly well established i think and and they probably aren't going to be a lot of secondary data sources to sort of inform recent economic activity i think you'll probably capture more of that you know from the int'l interview level activity about you know what sort of that neighborhood economic activities going on and how well that's connecting with are not connecting with with regional economic trends i mean if we were doing a city plan or regional plan we'd probably spend a lot more time on these issues and understanding variations and economic performance among different geographic areas and different different demographic groups so the last piece of sort of the sort of economic analysis that that usually is a starting point for a lot of economic development plans is sort of the economic structure analysis and here really the purpose is to understand you know what is the the nature of the local economy what are the major industries one of the trends in those industries and how does that affect sort of economic development opportunities and it's important here usually to understand the composition of employment but also the composition of wages in other words certain industries have more impact on a region in terms of income generation than they do for employment for example if you look at the Boston metropolitan region if you look at the high tech sector you know it's about I don't know twelve percent of employment but about twenty-five percent of wage income so one useful tool to do is not simply to just look at composition by by income by an employment or look at composition by wages and sort of get a sense of which industries a most significant in income generation also in terms of trends which industries are growing which industries are declining and we obviously care what are the major sources of employment but for example we know manufacturing is still a big source of employment in the region but it's a significant declining industry and that might affect how we want to invest in it in terms of job opportunities and then also having a sense of the Occupational composition of the largest industries and the growing industries one of the nature of jobs what are the skill requirements of those jobs and I'm going to talk more about that as we get into looking at the labor market but also trying to understand what might be important industry compositions industry clusters and enter industry relationships or supply chain relationships you know some of that you can uncover through the economic data themselves itself because some economic relationships you know or more apparent from the economic data you know if you have a aerospace industry and you have a metalworking industry you know chances are the metalworking industry is producing metal parts for the aerospace industry and but some of these relationships will also get uncovered by talking to two firms themselves and talking to economic development professionals who work with firms so in in the north end I think we have a good sense of the of the industry's the one sort of gap by the ice in a sense that we have we have a lot of regional economic data we have a sort of sense of what's happening neighborhood it might be useful to look a little at the city of Springfield is there something about the economy of Springfield that's worth understanding and will help us better understand the North End's role in the overall city economy so I mean so that's the one gap in some of the economic data that might be worth addressing so in doing this i think i passed out the necks this is sort of an outline of the North American industry classification system and this is really how economic data is organized and presented so when you go to the the establishment based data and and sort of collect information it's going to be organized by this this sort of representation or classification system of the economy and and one of the problems you face is the we've shifted from a classification system that was used pre-1997 the one that's post 1997 so that's probably not a big issue for us now but if we were doing long-term historic analysis you have this discontinuity in the classification of economic data that's a problem but if you're looking back to the late 90s through now you know all the data will be in the next classification system and you can see this is sort of a hierarchical system where you start with very broad sectors typically denoted by x two digits and then within each sector you get more and more detail in terms of the industry representation so if you look for example let's take a sector we're interested in if you flip to the last page and look at sector 62 that's health care and social assistance you see the next level of detail is sector 62 1 which is ambulatory health care services and actually if you work within the classification system this gets broken down into even more detail you know there's doctors offices dentists offices etc and so this is sort of the way that the system's broken up and you know not the smaller the geographic area typically the West disaggregated data will be available because you get into confidentiality issues in the release of data so you probably below at this at the city level you may not get that or below let's say a three or four digit makes code as where the state level and national level you could get you could get much more more detail so it's just it it's useful to be familiar with this and and be able to work with it as you as you as you're working with the economic data so if in doing the economic structure analysis I think it's useful to sort of approach this a little bit strategically because you often find you have an enormous amount of data and and where do I want to focus my my effort in sort of understanding the economic structure so I typically do when i do this is sort of start at a broad level sort of look at the broad sectoral composition of the area i'm interested in and and compare that to you know but other areas you know what sort of different about springfield versus the springfield region on the state is it much just that much larger health care sector does a much larger manufacturing sector and sort of trying identify the most important sectors to understand in more detail so that sort of a starting point you know you're not going to spend a lot of time you may not want to spend a lot of time looking at transportation or utilities if it's not important in that economy and spend more time looking at other sectors so once you've sort of identified the largest sectors or the most important in terms of job growth or job decline you're then going to look at the cross-sectional composition of those sectors by industry dig down to the two digit and three digit classifications to really understand that is the healthcare sector and spring field dominated by hospitals or is it dominated by nursing homes that could have very different implications in terms of Employment Development income generation you know etc and then you know look at how that that industry mix varies with the region and look at the relative wages of some of the industries or some industries higher wage versus whoa whoa age so if you have more time and resources you would dig even deeper into this you might analyze the 3-digit industries in more detail you might calculate location quotients or people familiar with what a location quotient is no okay but basically the location quotient is a ratio of the share of employment in an industry for that particular area let's say Springfield versus the share of employment in a reference area usually the nation so for example if hospitals are ten percent of employment in Springfield versus five percent of national employment you'd have a two-to-one ratio or occasion quotient of two and it's really a measure of relative concentration it's usually done for employment but you could do it for other factors like output for example which in some ways might be it might be a better indicator of sort of overall economic activity and it sort of gives you a sense of where there are stronger industry concentrations in sort of economic base analysis it's often used to distinguish between what's considered an export industry versus a non export industry but you know if anyone got through the Fall River study and you looked at the location quotients you show off for apparel you know location quotients of like 60 right the employment concentration of employment in that industry and for over 60 times the national average so clearly that's a very very significant concentration very important industry and area and it also might help you understand inter industry relationships if you see very high location quotients in the same in a set of industries chances are there are supplier relationships among them you know especially in the order of things like 20 30 40 those are in very very high location proportions and then you might do more research on most important issues not so much secondary research but primary research through talking to firms who talking to economic development organization lenders training agencies to really understand what are key trends in those industries what seemed to be important to the competitive advantages of the industries in that region are their specialized needs so the training needs of their financing needs and because often what your economic development interventions are about is how to address needs of industry's most important industries in your area to improve their you know competitiveness to grow and succeed and to try and link the benefits associated with those industries you know two firms and residents in your area so understanding sort of specialized needs like this example of a state if they have employment needs that are that are not being met well that's important to base States you know success but also that's an opportunity for residents in the north end if we could create better services to link residents with those jobs there should be a positive sum game both for Bay State and for local residents and doing the structure analysis becomes important you know for a number of sort of strategic approaches which industries to try and retain and support what emerging or faster growing industries what's going on structurally is the city or the region undergoing some significant structural changes that might have longer term implications for workforce training for financing for our technology services and other services and and you know the Greater Springfield areas certainly you know been going through that structural change still going through that trash structural change from a manufacturing based economy to a service-based economy I think they're still working through those issues on a number of levels and then really understanding the city in neighborhoods role in the regional economy and how you might want to change that over time so me before I go on to talk about the retail and real estate market analysis any sort of questions observations about the sort of you know economic analysis and how an if it might apply to the work with the lean in Springfield okay well you know we have to that's right but yep good good yeah yeah and well I think one thing one that's a very good point i think one thing to sort of might be useful in some of your interviewing to ask people what changes they've observed in the neighborhood and that might help you gauge you know what you're learning from the census data versus what people are seeing in the ground so if people i know one thing that certainly already come up is there seems to be new waves of immigration so the populations becoming more more diverse ethnically in terms of country of origin so we know that's one trend but it might be important to sort of identify some of those other trends has there been out migration of residents from the neighborhood has there been a lot of people perceived stability has there been new housing development or maybe what we see more of housing abandonment that might be changing the population so I think it's important to do some of that on the ground interviewing to gauge and interpret some of the stuff you having for the census one one thing you do have that Springfield benefits from is the Census Bureau has created the American Community Survey survey which does updates demographic information between the Census and so there's a 2003 information for Springfield overall it's not the north end but you know you might want to take a look at the changes some of the changes between 2000 2003 to see if they might suggest anything that might inform your understand in the north end but and in the retail analysis will also get into some of that stuff you may have to adjust as well you know income you have the census data is 1999 income you may want to make some adjustment than that income to reflect you know wage growth or income growth so that at least when we were doing the market analysis you're not using data that might be a little outdated good point yes thank you guys it seems that what you choose is you're comparing cases that will take effect how how analysis it comes out I wonder if you would like to expound at all Yeah right nice yeah well i think it's it's important certainly to compare to the metropolitan area I mean reserved talked about in the earlier class economic units really operate at a metropolitan level so I think it's certainly important to understand Springfield in the context of the Greater Springfield region you know because sometimes for example manufacturing decline within the city might be accompanied by manufacturing growth in the suburbs and that's a different story that if there's manufacturing decline in the city and manufacturing decline you know in the suburbs just to pick one example you know once you once you get beyond that I think it's one interesting question to ask is how to how does the community and how do political leaders in your area perceive as their frame of reference for comparison so for example if people in Springfield compare themselves to Hartford or see themselves competing with Hartford it might be important to compare Springfield to Hartford if they're more interested in how Springfield's doing versus Holyoke you know you might be more important to comparison feel too holy oh so sometimes that sort of you know local frame of reference can be very important because it's it's how is how people are thinking for example in warrants people in warrants are always comparing themselves to well it's in front of these sort of comparisons and that could be a good thing in a bad thing sometimes but it might be important to sort of understand you know that because it is so central to people's sort of frame of reference so you know that that's another factor to take into account you know also I mean if there are certain areas that are important for certain type of uses I mean for example if you're if you're interested in in main street in in the north end and you really interested in retail development well you probably want find out one of the major retail centers outside of the north end so that you might if you will heat at the retail industry compare you might end up comparing Springfield a lot more to Holyoke because there's so much retail activity and Holyoke and you might you know compare it to other places so you know you can vary that frame of reference for particular industries ok well let's talk a little about retail and and real estate market analysis and there are a number of purposes with this one often this is done in the context of development at specific sites so and and you know I think both of the sample reports I gave you the read or site oriented market analysis we have a vacant building we want to reuse it we want to understand what the market is for it and it's very helpful in that respect but it might also be done in a broader community context you know white a commercial district or like a city that's really trying to target businesses to attract you know what might make sense to attract along the north end given the nature of the market the retail market they are or and this is another important point it can be very helpful to existing businesses to better understand their market especially in the retail level if if businesses are oriented towards one demographic group but they don't understand the rest of the consumer market out there they can be missing some important market opportunities or if they really don't understand how people are spending money and that might affect how they merchandize you know you might you might have a grocery store and it might be important to realize that people are increasingly spending more and more their food money eating not at home but eating you know outside of the home and therefore a grocery store might decide there's an important part of the market i'm missing maybe i should set up a sandwich you know or a catering business or something that could help me tap into this in growing market for eating away from home etc so the market analysis can also be very helpful in helping existing businesses rethink their business strategy and and do better so the the analysis really has sort of four parts you know a sort of demand side analysis supply side analysis then really trying to find junior analysis if there are special conditions that sort of the standard analysis doesn't encounter special opportunities you might want to cover special market segments you want to understand in more detail and then you've got to integrate that analysis to draw conclusions what are markets we want to target for our particular business or project or community what might be a feasible development type what is the level of Emma and that demand and and really I think what you're looking for is what our market gaps that you can fill or market opportunities that you really want to build on and and and really trying to use this analysis to better understand that and the one last point to make in just this introduction is to realize that that what drives demand is different for different types of development types so retail development is really driven by customer spending so the demand analysis is really looking at local income and spending for different types of goods and services represented by that income when you're looking at office development or industrial development it's really driven by firm growth and employment growth that's really what generates the man so you're looking at at employment information and economic growth information as opposed to consumer spending another way to think about this is sort of retailers household driven market for retailers household driven in the market for you know other will state uses is really establishment driven so in looking at the retail market analysis the sort of standard approach is you define the trade area or the market area for the site you looking at or for the commercial district you're looking at and you know I while there are some some sort of regular rigorous methods that that try and define the market area you know gravity models that that you know look at density of population and you know distance between retail centers and the like I think it is more art than science and you know part of it is by looking at the nature of the of the district for example you know when you're looking at Main Street in the north end it's much more convenience oriented in the goods and services it provides it probably has a smaller trade area you know mile to a mile and a half if you look at the Ingleside mall at Holyoke you know that's a huge comparison shopping destination you know may well have a 20 or 30 mile trade area because of the nature of the activity there so you have to sort of look at the character of the retail activity and look at sort of competing retail centers often it's useful to talk to to merchants themselves to get a sense of the geography that their customers are coming from because that helps define the trade area as well and some merchants one thing that sometimes helpful is now you know merchants will have credit card data that can give you a zip code or a community distribution of some of their residents so sometimes if they're going to share that data you can get a pretty good mapping of that of the trade area so once you've defined the trade area you have to look at what are the number of households in that area and generate total household income in that area number of households and average household income or four if you don't have that total population and per capita income you can get the total income in that area and then by using data from the Consumer Expenditure survey that's the survey that the bureau of labor statistics does an annual basis they survey they actually households have a very detailed blog where they record their expenditures and they produce data on spending you know in enormous detail by different product and you can get that data by the Bureau at the Bureau of voyeuristic site and it's cut in a lot of different ways which can make it confusing in terms of you know what data do I want to use to estimate spending it can be broken down by income group it's broken down by age it's broken down by ethnicity and there are probably others you can you could also get some cross tabulations like region by ethnicity and stuff like that so you do have this this sort of issue of which looks data to use do I want to understand my my market do I send and I think part of it is sort of what do you think most important in driving expenditures if you have if you're in a middle-class community where incomes are very comparable but there's a lot of racial diversity or a lot of difference in age you might stick with data that that varies more by by age or by ethnicity if you're a mixed-income community to a lot of income diversity you're probably going to want to do it by income I mean you actually look at expenditure data the variation by income is much larger than other types of variation so if i was going to choose one metric through which to sort of you know create a more fine-tuned estimate of expenditures i go with income because you know if you look at people with less than 10,000 and income versus more than 70,000 income there were very worst disparities and how they're spending their money much more than disparities but by other characteristics and so then you can generate demand by different product categories and you do have another issue with this data you sometimes have to try and convert that into spending by store type because product categories don't necessarily align with store types when you when you look at the Consumer Expenditure data it talks about for example food food purchases food at home purchases well if anyone you know if you go to a supermarket you know that food was only one effective what a supermarket cells right there's cleaning supplies there's house other household supplies so you often have to adjust for for store type and then the other thing you you're probably going to do is make some adjustment for what likely market share a capture rate you think the local area is going to get based on demand you know no area gets one hundred percent of the area's spending so you're going to make some adjustments to demand based on based on competition and then you'll divide that resulting expenditure by sales per square feet of typical stores to get supportable square footage so for other words if you have a million dollars of spending on eating out in the average restaurant you know generate sales of two hundred dollars per square foot you divide the million by two hundred and you would get you know 500,000 square feet of supportable restaurant space right that that spending would support and then that just gives you the demand side picture but you know you have to factor in to the market analysis supply so the first thing you want to do is identify what are the competing stores in turn air your trade area and then make some judgment about what are the competitive differences between your site or your community stores and the competing areas for example if if your stores are bigger than the competing stores you're going to capture a larger market share if your stores are national brand names versus independent stores chances are you going to capture a larger market share so if you have a larger concentration of restaurants you're probably going to capture more restaurant spending so you're going to make some judgments about the relative competitiveness of your location versus competing locations and then you also want to look at you know what else is being planned or under development in the market area because you might not have a supermarket right now but if there's a supermarket under development that's definitely going to influence the potential market so based on on this sort of analysis you'll make an estimate of market share then your particular site or type of store can accomplish and translate this dollar value into a dollar value and then you know come up with a refined level of supportable square footage so the Brockton supermarket example that you had sort of makes this a little more easier to follow and I like to give out that study because it's very explicit in terms of how they sort of walk through the steps involved but they defined a mile and a half primary market trade area there were a little almost eighteen thousand households with almost six hundred and twenty million dollars worth of spending they then translated this into supermarket spending at eleven and a half percent of income that I took a percentage of gross me spending and a percentage of non grocery spending that aggregated to eleven and a half percent you know they estimated at eighty percent capture rate and used a range of 350 to 500 dollars per square foot of sales at supermarkets and they came up with you know this these households could support somewhere between 114 to 160 4,000 square feet of supermarket space however what they found was you know on the fringes of the trade area or in one case one within the trade area there are five existing grocery stores with more square footage than then could be supported by the trade area so basically you're looking at inserting a sixth supermarket into this market area you know if it's a if it's a major supermarket it should capture roughly you know somewhere around the sixth of the spending so they estimated you know ten to fifteen percent of market share and I think probably they discounted it a little bit because a new supermarket exists entering a existing area is going to have to take customers away they're probably going to do a little less than then capture an equal and equal volume so what they found was if you based on this market share you can support somewhere between 11,000 to 24,000 square feet of supermarket space the problem with this is no chain supermarket will build the store that small they typically want stores of at least 35,000 square feet in these days with the trends or super stores they typically look for 50,000 square feet or more so what the conclusion you weren't going to support a chain grocery store at the site perhaps you could support an independent store but an independent store is going to capture less of the market so they basically cut the market capture rate in half and that could support 11,000 square foot grocery store at that site they then went back and asked well perhaps this is a community that has a higher minority and immigrant population what if we get an independent store that caters more to that population perhaps we can support a larger store and they did some estimate that that showed you could potentially add another two to three thousand square feet to the size of the store if you really cater to that market so that's sort of an example of sort of walking through that sort of specific analysis for for a specific type of store in addition to doing this on a site level you could do it at a community wide level or a district level through a technique that sometimes called sales gap analysis and basically what you do is you estimate demand across a range of store types and then look at existing spending within the trade area for those same store types and you estimate a a sales gap and the notion is if you have an area with as a ward sales gap in other words we have a large excess of consumer demand over existing sales there's an opportunity to attract new stores or for expansion of existing stores so the difficulty here is you need a good inventory of existing square footage of stores in your area I mean sometimes you can use economic census data if you happen to be doing this for the city of Springfield for example you can take the economic census data and you can get retail sales for that city but on a subsidy area you really can't get that data so you really have to do an inventory and estimate the square footage and then use industry data typically from the dollar and cents of shopping centers on square foot sales and you can multiply that we're footage times average sales and you can get an estimate of actual sales in that area so this is sort of an example of the outcome of this this was a sales gap analysis done for brattleboro vermont and you can see that you know some areas like furniture and home furnishings there's a huge gap between demand and existing sales but then you have others you know like building materials food and beverage whether they were there where there's a gap but the spending capture rate is pretty high I mean you know it's unlikely you're ever going to get much higher than 80 or 85 percent of what we're spending because you know people are going to do some purchasing you know when they go on vacation when they're traveling to and from work they're going to go outside the area for all sorts of preferences so you know it's a capture rate of seventy or eighty percent you pretty much maxed out you know button but in other areas you know when you have a rate of thirty percent or twenty percent there's definitely a significant room for expansion so you know this is a potential tool you could use in the north end especially if you were interested in in looking at attracting new businesses along Main Street and what could be supported but and also perhaps helping people understand new business opportunities you know what what might be fruitful area is to try and encourage people to develop businesses because there's unmet demand in the neighbor the other end I think is important to realize is that when you actually this analysis sort of assumes stores operating in isolation with a sort of ability to build the store and attract customers to sort of respond to unmet demand but in reality sort of a lot of other factors influence the success of a business in a commercial district and it's important to take this into account in making you know judgments about what are real market opportunities one is that you know custom people typically don't go shopping just to go to one store they're either doing convenient shopping where they they do multiple stores on one trip where they do comparison shopping where they're attracted to sort of agglomerations of stores so understanding the sort of agglomerations within your neighborhood is important if you have a lot of restaurants you may actually have more but you might be better served attracting more restaurants even though that's counterintuitive then you know adding furniture stores because you're not a destination anyone thinks up for furniture stores if there's a major area people already do their furniture shopping might not work to to create another furniture store but if you're already a destination for restaurants might be easier to add restaurant so you know sometimes you know building on the existing agglomeration it works better than than trying to fill gaps yes provided that you establish that the capture rate shows increase not always i mean for example if you are a if you're a regional destination for shopping your market areas and local right i mean a good example in the sprinkler errors if you look at northampton northampton has like over 100 restaurants you know if you probably looked at compared restaurants spending to the city's you know restaurant demand you probably will have a you know a negative capture rate you'll probably show sales in excess and local demand because it's attracting people from outside the city so you know it's not necessarily that the case I think the one and that's where the distinction between sort of convenience versus sort of comparison shopping is important you know people typically don't go you you don't typically have a excess in grocery stores or you know hardware or something like that you know something that's a convenience item that people don't travel far to buy but you might have an excess in something like restaurants or clothing or furniture where people will go along a distance and and want to have choice in where they shop so even if you don't have a sales gap might be able to build on existing an existing conglomeration the other way the district made function and the north end is a good example of this you might have specific customer demographic niches that really form the foundation for your commercial district so you know there might be opportunities to grow your business by you know catering to regional shoppers within that that demographic district so the north end you know might become a Latino business destination that could expand by attracting people from Holyoke and west springfield and Chicopee as opposed to just serving the neighborhood and that's certainly an idea of people have been talking about and that might create different types of opportunities you know consumer image and perception the district affect its market once again we've heard a lot about that in the north end issues of Public Safety another big issue in urban communities is is what is the wind and building stock suggest about what type of tenants you actually can support right you saw in brattleboro a big gap in in furniture stores well what do we know about furniture stores that might account for that what right I mean furniture stores are wards and you know a lot of space in an older urban area you tend to not have but reward spaces available to support furniture stores so even if you have a supply you know gap you may not have the real estate to respond to that gap and this is increasingly a challenge as trends and real in in retailing have gone to its bigger and bigger stores right you know a lot of retailers don't want 5,000 square feet you know they want 10,000 20,000 30,000 square feet and a lot of chain retailers have very inflexible store formats and sites for store formats you know drug stores are notorious for this they want a 10,000 square foot to 15,000 square box with a drive-through window so sometimes very hard to get them to go into an urban area where they have to adjust their format so that could be a constraint as well and also you know the the competition for retailing has gotten more complex not only you know do you face other competing commercial districts and malls you now have to factor in mail water and internet and things like that in in affecting the opportunity so often this sort of secondary data analysis that I just sort of walk you through really gives you an incomplete picture and you really have to do more analysis to really better understand the retail opportunities and that usually means doing more assessment of more comparative analysis of your retail and market niches of your commercial area versus competing commercial areas be able to understand the vacant land and building space that's available and how that fits store requirements you know I'm doing business surveys to understand businesses customer base you know what businesses are willing to do in terms of investing and marketing their business surveying customers to better understand how they perceive the neighborhood why they shop there when they shop there where they're going for competing goods what we might attract them to the area and doing focus group and interviews so to really better understand how you might be able to change the behavior of property owners and business owners to take advantage of some of these market opportunities one of the big challenges for you know urban commercial districts is that you have so many fragmented individuals you know property ownership is fragmented merchants are fragmented and they're competing against malls you know which have a common have one property owner that's forcing businesses to stay open at the same time to market together that's engineering the mixture of stores to you know address understandings of how how shoppers shop and and and what you know mixes of stores tend to be more successful in attracting shoppers and you're trying to which trying to compete with that in a commercial district where you might have you know some restaurants that are only open for lunch and some that are only open for dinner and some that you know have different times and and you know some that do market and some that don't work it so it's a big challenge to try and get people to work together and coordinate what they're doing gives us a sense of all of you and number of jobs within within the retail stores well I mean there are sort of a few sources one is the bureau of labor statistics produces what an Occupational matrix is on the national level by industry and it goes down to pretty fine detail so if you want to look at the distribution of occupations for you know drugstores you can get that distribution now you have to keep in mind that you're getting that for the entire drug store industry not not a drug store you know so you have to you know for example that data will include lawyers working in corporate headquarters for CBS you know as well as sales clerk so you have to you know somewhat adjust that data to reflect you know that the fact that you might be looking at a store the other the other data is to actually speak to the businesses themselves and understand you know what their staffing patterns are but the the BOS data is a good first cut because it gives you a sense of the type of jobs it gives you a sense of the wage levels of the jobs and could give you a first cut it at whether there might be some sort of career ladder within some of the some of these businesses um some industry some industry associations produce studies or data around around some of this and some don't you know it really depends you know for example the Food Marketing Association has done some work on urban supermarkets and they have produced you know some reports that talk about successful community collaborations around urban supermarkets and some examples of job training programs and employment programs around that you know so sometimes the trade associations are a source of data and you know also some of the employment and training agencies may have done or funders of employment and training agencies for example in Boston there's been a lot of work among the foundations around career development career literacy job ladder development into industries so if you were to go to the Boston foundation actually there are some very good studies around that you know in the healthcare field for example because they've been looking at those issues so sometimes you know you can find that type of research so just thinking maybe what we should do is let me just finish up the retail piece and then we can take a break the other thing I think it's important in in doing this type of retail analysis and I've talked a little about it as urban neighborhoods are very different than then suburban rural environments for retailing and I think you have to be a little more skeptical and use a little more of your own common sense to adjust some of the numbers you're seeing even if it's not scientific I think it's better to use good judgment and information to to make at sort of informed assumptions that you could use to adjust some of your data so you know one is we know there's a lot of undercounting of the population in urban areas so you might want to adjust up your population count or your household count to reflect the fact that there's likely mid an undercount also as we talked about you know outdated information you might want to adjust for new housing development or other changes in the neighborhood there also might be a lot of informal economic activity that's under counting actual income so you might want to you know make some adjustment to to income based upon some knowledge or estimates of informal activity there also may be a lot of remittances if it's a if it's a community with a lot of recent immigrants there might be a lot of money flowing back to the country of origin you might want to make some adjustment to income for remittances because that's not really available for consumption locally the other part is on the supply side there may be a lot of spending and informal and enterprises that you know discount the actual market so if you know there's a lot of people doing cutting hair in people in their home or repairing cars you know in the backyard you might want to factor in not only the formal enterprises but some of the informal enterprises and estimating markets they are the other thing is too is we've already talked about there's often a lot of market expansion opportunities in urban areas beyond just the local residential population so and that might be you know demographic or niche focus but it also can be sort of a visitor component and we're talking a lot about that in terms of employees at baystate right you know we know there are thousands of employees coming into the neighborhood that are another potential market there might be a lot of students in an area near an area that are a potential market so it's important to kind of look at these sort of quote visitor markets and look at them as a potential source of demand but also it's important to avoid double counting you have to opportunity for out of error if you count students as both students and residents so you want to be a little careful that might not be as big an issue I mean one of the things you'd want to do if you're going to look at baystate and estimate the man from bay state employees that would try and get an estimate from bay state of how many of the employees actually live in the north end and sort of back out that number from from the estimated demand so let me stop there and why don't we take a break one of the things I I'm going to do is James has begin to assemble some of the data for you and I thought one of the one of the assignments I would give out for one of the groups to work on is to do some of the sort of basic demand side analysis supply-side analysis to get a better understanding of the retail market and the neighborhood and trying to apply this to the north end okay well why don't we take a ten-minute break and we can though I'm going to skip over the sort of office real estate market analysis piece I think you you sort of read an example of that and I could post this on the stela fight if people want to look more at that because I wanted to have more time to sort of focus on this this issue of community resource assessment which is is quite important economic development planning work because because ultimately I think ninety percent or large percent of what economic development is really about is improving the quality of local resources and better connecting them to economic opportunities and connecting them to firms and industries so that they better support the growth and competitiveness of those industries and better link the economic benefits of those industries to to residents in the community so it's in most economic development plans I've worked on there's usually a fair amount of effort and work that goes into really assessing the local resources looking at how well they're contributing currently did Development Goals and figuring out ways to apply them more effectively and generally guided in this work by a few pretty basic questions you know what are the what are the important resources especially the ones that are most important for what your economic development goals and agenda are are there you know striking gaps constraints or weaknesses in in those resources how well the resources being utilized and and by whom and then what might be the obstacles to their utilization I mean it's striking just in the initial interviews that people have already done how much you've uncovered these type of issues already in the community how much observation that we some of your interviewees have have raised about about resources that are in the community either a workforce or business development resources and perceived lack of utilization of those resources so we you know didn't take a lot of work to uncover that as an issue and digging deeper about about what might be the reasons why those aren't being what we were utilized you know is it language barriers or is it that what's being offered it really doesn't doesn't fit the need and respond to employers or residents also a third issue who are their specialized resource needs for either key industries you know special workforce needs special finance you need special technology needs on the demand side of the equation or in the supply side are there certain populations that have very specialized needs that are not getting well served them you've already talked a little about how there might be specific needs around child care and linking child care to education and training that might be important for North End residents you know if that's a gap it might be very important to address that Spanish language skills as well services as well and then you know what's the agenda to improve existing resources ensure the better utilized target them to economic development goals and and what are the specific actions to do that so that's sort of a simple framework easy to conceptualize a lot different different difficult to sort of exercise in practice because there's usually a lot of data that you need to get almost all of it primary data collection but ultimately there are sort of five broad resource areas that you might potentially look at one being land facilities and infrastructure the sort of physical component to supporting economic development second is is human capital labor force resources both both the labor force itself but how the education and training system as well capital resources financing to support businesses technology resources and then organizational capacity and relationships for economic development so you know typically that you can use that that same sort of four-part framework for this but the sort of research focus who you collect information from is going to vary and you gonna um we don't have the resources to do all of this in depth so you're going to have to set some priorities based on what your agenda is you know in a downtown revitalization plan you might spend more time on infrastructure and physical resources and we might and you know given the issues we're facing the north end it's probably important to spend more time on the human resource human capital side of the equation then on some of the others and also you understand the local economy is going to shift you in certain directions and we've already done that by the focus on Bay State and the health care sector so I thought I'd talk a little about how to apply this resource analysis approach to the human capital employment and training system since that's a pretty important area that we're already working on so on the on the demand side the critical issue oh and let me pass this out from the Aspen Institute before and i think it's a it's a sort of useful way to begin to think about this on the on the demand side we're really interested in you know where are the job opportunities what are the requirements for those jobs how well do they fit the targeted populations we're trying to get employed are their specialized way before us needs and skill needs that are critical to the industry or that they have to have trouble finding employees for and then you know what programs and services and our employers using to hire and train workers and how well do they perceive those as working and on the supply side we really need to know what are the Education Skills quote quality and cost of the local labor force and you know is the labor force how well does the labor force match up with the demand side are there are there pretty significant mismatches between occupations and competencies that employers are looking for versus what the local labor force is supplying and then you know what are the experience and employment obstacles for for people looking for work because often the perception of the labor market from the employers perspective and the the job seekers perspective could be could be very different and there are a lot of often a lot of inefficiencies and misinformation in the labor market I was actually at a talk recently where a group working with hard to employ youth and Detroit interviewed youths in Detroit about what their knowledge was of health sector jobs you know trying to say you know should high school students are high schools and thinking about jobs in health care what do they understand about it and people's perception of health care is that basically it was doctors and nurses very high skilled jobs very difficult job to get trained for and that would you know they really didn't have an understanding of the range of jobs and didn't have much understanding about what might be you know occupations that might provide them a good wage that they might be able to get to through high school diploma west perhaps some vocational training or even the notion of a career ladder within that industry so often there's a lot of misinformation and work I did in the Greater Hartford region where in the 1990s where there was a skill shortage in manufacturing you found a lot of young people in high school perceiving of manufacturing jobs as well paying very hard work and very unclean environments and didn't necessarily realize that you know manufacturing plants were now oh I cleaner that there were very high pain machinist jobs you could earn sixty seventy thousand dollars working in a manufacturing plant as a skilled machinist oh so really understanding some of those obstacles information obstacles and other obstacles and then looking at how well the education and training system is functioning to sort of fill those that link between between supply and demand and what are the gaps issues and problems in the system that that we're going to try and address through through some programs and interventions so on the demand side you know there's a fair amount of secondary data that provides you a first cut on this by you could look at major industries in the region and then you could look at occupation within those industries through the bureau of labor statistics Occupational matrix and then after there are regional occupational surveys that will give you income levels in different occupations so you can take some some existing secondary data to provide an initial profile of both the type of jobs and occupations and what they pay and you could also get some basic information about the requirements for those jobs there's a occupational manual which kind of details the requirements of occupations and now the bureau of labor statistics has come up with this 11-point scale of educational attainment requirements or experience and educational attainment requirements of occupation so you could you could at least get an initial cut of whether this occupation I is a advanced degree or a college degree push work experience or you know a year of prior work experience or etc so there's a there's a coding system that at least gives you some initial indication of what the skill levels are but I think it's also important to to be talking to major employers to get a sense of what their demand for labor is too because they may have requirements that are different than standard occupational requirements they may organize work differently they may have higher or lower thresholds based on labor market conditions they may have structured internal benefits and internal advancement opportunities you know differently than they exist generally within within the industry so pretty important to talk to employers it's also important to understand how they hire because often access to jobs is affected by how people are hired for jobs you know there's a lot of literature to support informal mechanisms by hiring you know employers referring people through other employers and you know especially if you have residents that are already present in the industry that one of the biggest barriers to get into that industry may just be the outsider the sort of informal hiring network that sort of used and and how can you begin to sort of insert a more formal hiring network into an informal hiring network and one way to do that is when there are skilled when there are shortages of labor that sort of opens up the traditional hiring mechanisms and employers of use can give you an opportunity to insert an intermediary in that relationship between the community and the employer to link neighborhood to those jobs also you know what are employers experience with that local labor for us that's sort of analogous to what we heard a little bit about Bay States experience with small firms you know they tried to use local firms and there were some gaps are there are their perceived problems with the labor force people not you know showing up for work late having a high school diploma but not being able to actually read or do math at levels that they are expected to you know those are those sort of issues can be often be an important part of what you have to address in terms of in terms of job access so and I think we're likely to find some of that so in talking to the employers and getting a robust sense of their needs and experience as important to the demand side analysis and just a few examples I thought and talked to economic development planning class a few years ago worked on a a industrial park development that the Municipal Airport in Lawrence and the hiring plan was a big part of that and basically they defined industries in the region in terms of size regional growth and wage levels to identify target industries they then identified some of the major employers in those industries through looking at him and directories of businesses and by talking to key informants in the in the region and then they directly interviewed firms to really assess what type of labor demand they had what the requirements are what their wages were and really identified an opportunity for some entry-level manufacturing jobs that grow to be good waited in a few industries and and sort of built a lot of their plans around around those firms and around employment placement and training linkages to them the example from the Aspen Institute report talk really about a method that was much more driven by secondary data sources once again using ES 202 data to determine the location employers and industry using this Occupational matrix to estimate openings and then using the directory of Occupational titles to assess job requirements on the supply side once again this is looking more carefully at the labor force in the area first working at the demographics of the way before us that might indicate potential and in obstacles if English language skills are a barrier of having a lot of young kids or barrier what is their educational attainment what is their work experience in other occupations and industries that could be helpful in figuring out which which industries they're equipped for gain understanding of what might be causes to unemployment there's there are very high levels of unemployment and will labor force participation in North End I think it's going to be important to understand you know why that is what are the barriers among people is it a perception of poor jobs is it English language skills as a child care skills as a transportation what are the set of things that are keeping residents out of the way before us and then what our employees perceptions of opportunities I've already talked about that but also what are non-traditional sills and experiences are their experiences that people have businesses they've owned and managed volunteer work political experience things that can translate into skills that will make them more employable or or you know prepare them for employment and training so this chart lays out some of the tools that you can look at in assessing the labor force you know census data we've already talked about it might be interesting to look at whether through the work of neon and and some of the other agencies in the north end what data if ever they have collected on employment histories of residents do they have any information and is there any information through the school systems about testing of students and what that might suggest about you know English and math competencies that affect access to certain occupations so there might be some some secondary data within the education and social service system that that can be useful as well as as we've talked about you know informal key informant interviews one of the things I think it might be worth thinking about is whether there's some benefit to doing some sort of survey of resonance as part of developing your employment and/or business development strategy since you do have unique access to residents through through the neon outreach workers it might be more feasible to do a survey then it might be in other classes and it might be useful in both understanding getting more information and prior work experience barriers to employment interest in starting businesses and the light to do some sort of service survey the last piece is sort of looking at the employment and training system and here you know we've already begun to identify what are some of the key institutions and some of the providers I think you want to take a fairly broad look at this obviously the K through 12 education system and secondary education systems but often there's a lot of other sources of job training for example there are often private vocational schools that people utilize and there might be community-based organizations that are doing a lot of training as well so I think it's important to be fairly comprehensive in what you look at and also understanding how recent federal changes you know there's been a lot of changes through the welfare reform system and through the workforce investment act system and understanding how that's affecting what people can do in terms of services and then another thing I think that's important to look at is what are the relationship between training programs because often this is a big issue especially if you're trying to develop job ladders and you're trying to move people you know from a situation where they might need ESL and basic education into a situation where they can then get you know more occupational related skills do the training providers have relationships with each other that link those services do they have what are called articulation agreements so that completing courses in in one program prepare you for you know program in another and you could transfer credits and training through the system to end up with our with a higher certification or higher degree what are the relationship with employers are the training agencies developing their curriculum around the needs of employers do they have a placement relationships with employers are they providing post placement support so that when people get into those jobs they have support to stay in those jobs those are always all important and are they connected to economic development activities so that when economic development organizations are helping firms expand or recruiting firms into the area are they looking up with the employment and training system to hire local residents for those jobs or you notice there were a total mismatch which is often the case one of the things i would say in terms of information sources we've already talked about secondary sources and int and interviews I think it'd be important to look at whether a recent evaluation reports that have been done or whether there have been policy development reports that have been done at the state of regional level often those can be very useful and then I just wanted to talk a little bit about I was involved in an assessment of employment and training system in boston for the hyannis foundation a few years ago and this was really to try and develop a funding strategy for them around workforce development and these were some of the findings and you know I wouldn't be surprised if you found some of the same type of issues in the Greater Springfield area while Boston had a lot Boston has a very rich network of community-based employment and training agencies what we found was they often were not well connected to other actors in the workforce development system so you often had community colleges doing a lot is raining in parallel community-based organizations and there wasn't a good wing kajen ways for those services to get integrated there was under supply of basic skills training you know the demand for Adult Basic Education ESL and job readiness training far exceeded what the system was supplying and I think this has been pretty well established as a statewide problem some of the reports that mass Inc have done and others is as a huge undersupply relative to the need for for these services a lack of case management services you know often what we found was people had multiple obstacles to employment they needed to coordinate transportation daycare job training services they might have had health care issues that also interfered with the ability to get to work and there wasn't really someone who could help them navigate those different systems and package the services for them in a way that that they weren't you know falling out of the system they might get a job but because transportation fell through or housing fell through they couldn't stay with a job and no one was helping them coordinate those services lack of child care availability and quality of childcare too was an issue a lot of people didn't want to you know put their children and caught in in child care because they didn't feel good quality charter was available and then pretty weak connections between workforce development service providers and employers and it's still surprising how much workforce development activity gets done without really understanding and needs of employers or trying to link the graduates of training programs to employers you know a lot of organizations just deal with the sort of supply side of the equation and so so finding ways to better make those connections so the people who come out of the training programs get hired become pretty important so that's a quick overview we can talk more about how you might apply this and some of the work you're doing in class on Thursday I wanted to make sure a Caesar had time to talk about some of the reflection tools yeah sure you just need that kids now hello don't have things to do when you have two minutes and in the class yeah we can make that happen and we might just pick up on some more of this later on you know either other work session are otherwise I just want to spend a few minutes talking about a kind of another way of sorry another way of kind of getting an information and data and particularly wanted to talk about something that we do in the center because one of the things that we really try to focus on is how what can we learn from people who are actually on the ground in communities kind of doing work and what's difficult about that and what are some tools techniques that can actually help in that work and and I want to talk about one in particular that we've developed something called a kind of a critical moments reflection process so give you a brief overview I'll put a couple of other things up on the lab that can help you kind of go through it and then if you decide this technique really works or something you want to do with a particular group then we can actually do some more kind of hands-on coaching about actually how you kind of go about doing it um let me start out by saying little things about what this is based on and where it comes out of it this actually comes out of our work in kind of work with communities particularly people who are doing what we normally call on the ground community development work so these are folks were running agencies are trying to provide some kind of service at the community level who are from the community and who like mainly the characters you've already mentioned Matt Carlos milta folks like that are just like doing the work but when you really try to talk to them about what they do it gets kind of hard because sometimes they don't actually really know what they know about the work that they're doing and shade up air conditioning it would be helpful and actually give you put the screen up to when you're at it I think i'm going to write all Thanks oh so oftentimes you know people who are the midst of a set of work and really kind of getting good at it or making by at it have a hard time articulating to other people articulating to other people kind of what they really know about that this is not easily accessible information and it's interesting because it doesn't just happen to people you know at the community level when folks were first starting to deal with the similar early days of dealing with artificial intelligence and trying to figure out can you really make machines think like people one of the first areas that they try to try to mimic to see if they can really test this ideals that you could build a thinking machine was actually in the medical profession and what they thought was look if you look at a regular doctor a doctor kind of goes in and looks at a patient and has a whole set of procedures for diagnosing what's going on and it can go through that whole procedure and go through someone and take him through a set of things and actually give you a back not diagnosis of what's wrong with you and so the early days of artificial intelligence what they were doing was really trying to figure out can we build a computer that can do that process and the first steps they did and trying to figure that out was to kind of map the thinking of doctors who are really good exact nossing certain kinds of diseases and a funny thing happened as they went through it and tried to figure it out is that the people who are really good at diagnosing certain kinds of diseases didn't know how they knew right they just they couldn't say well and then I knew this because but somehow they knew there was another set of knowledge and it became very difficult for people who are trying to figure out this work about well then how do you kind of get it what they know and this whole thing about kind of people having knowledge on the ground oh that's really important you know we think is really true and we've kind of developed some methods of getting at it based on a couple of assumptions one is that the a lot of people know is actually built a narrative and if you help them work with the story around the work that they do you can actually get at some of that knowledge and the other is is that people who are really kind of engaged instead of work won't really do that narrative work if they don't see it really tied to something they're trying to work on right now so it's a real kind of a little dilemma right you're trying to get them to be clear about something they know they're always focused on what they want to do next and so how do you create the space for both of those things to happen when we were talking about doing this course I thought it might be really helpful to talk about this methodology because there are a number of people in the north end who are doing things right now businesses and stuff like that that who are doing it on the fly who are doing it on the cheap been around for a long time well establish and not very much is really known about what they doing how they do it and I think there's one set of data you can get from just doing a set of interviews with people I think there's another set of data about what allows people to work in that community and survive and the real kind of details and nuance of their work but I think you can only get if you do something much more purposeful and reflective so I'm going to just go for five minutes and tell you some of the elements of this work without going into the real details of it and then I'll put some stuff up on the course site and then would urge any of you who want to think about this is a methodology to either get home a wisdom and we have some other works you can look at to talk about how to do it so methodology has a several point kind of like seven steps toward and the first is that you do everything that's what we call kind of setting a kind of framing context for the work a reflection work almost always happens in groups so you work with a group of people at one point in time so this might be something you will do with a set of small business owners or set of residents you're trying to understand how they go about job seeking to be any set of people but it's always known of people and we can talk about the reasons around that but in order to do it you really inviting people into a context so the contents maybe if we look at maybe doing a reflection session with a set of women who are trying to enter basically the labor market we can say that's really the context we're really trying to understand job seeking strategies and what it's been like for you to really go after jobs and kind of do that with that kind of framing it's really yours right and you kind of frame it up with that way and you kind of put some time frame around and you'll see why the time is really important so it could be like we're really trying to understand you know you'll say to each of these we're really trying to understand what it's been like for you to for the last three years your efforts are going and working and trying to work from that standpoint on really that context is kind of set aside because what you really do nets of people is you actually get people trying to main what we call questions in the work what we mean by that is we have people go through a process of naming what we call their own inquiry questions and this is a question it goes something like this so again let's take the job seeking peace the question maybe something like you say the people named a question that if you knew the answer to you believe it would help you towards this goal that you have around trying to get a job alright so it's a very interesting kind of kind of question it's about trying to get them to think about something they wish they have the answer to and most again most of the work we do this is we do it around people who are actually in the midst of doing a kind of work so it would be interesting to think about how would you do this to really kind of work it in a different context so for example we just did a set of interviews with the with some folks in this community in Honduras and the kind of when we put that framing question out for them it was really about them what's a question if you knew the answer two would really help you understand more about how you can improve the condition of Education in your community because that's what they were working on and they have questions that they really wanted to know and it's always about questions that you yourself can act on so it's not like a question like why doesn't the federal government give us 100 million owes more well you know that's a different kind of question you know but really were a questions in the context of the sphere of influence where you feel you can do something ah and then once people kind of name those questions you actually have people talk about why they named that question you get the group to rank those questions and then you put them away because in that step is what we call this kind of naming of critical moments and in that stage what you have the group do is each person goes back to the framing context we talked about before so again if i use the the thing about a kind of job seeking among a set of women over three year period you would actually have people take that framing and you would say to them what we want you to do is name from your perspective all the critical moments or incidents that happen to you related to this context and for each one people would say well this was the critical moment around that this is and they have the name why and when it happened right ah and then we put up a timeline we have everybody put their critical moments upon the timeline and this works really well if people have been involved in the same work together because what you're allowing people to do is look at perspective on something different so if you had a set of people who are trying to run a biz sets of businesses in the same area and you had a question about what made it you know what was really good about you know a particular effort to maybe improve the neighborhood that they were involved and then when you have people filling out this timeline you're actually getting different perspectives on the same event from where people are really kind of sitting so the critical moments name is doing that and then the second part of it is is after everybody goes up and puts their stuff on a timeline into this big timeline with people say well these are the events that I thought were important why I thought they were important you then go back to the questions that they raised if they identified as the things that they think they need answers to and they go back in there map critical moments and say well which of these things if we understood them better would really help us answer this question so you're actually doing a mapping where you go through and things listed 25 critical moments they may select three that they think really if they understood them that they would have some answer it might help them answer the question they have before again the idea behind this is that in their practice they already have a set of knowledge related to the questions are trying to answer you know they may not have all the hands all the answers to it all the knowledge to but they actually do but they're just kind of having really uncovered it and then you do the next piece of it is and said well if you really understand this particular critical moment and for example it may be the critical moment was if we took or critical mode can be anything if I took the case in the story in Honduras around the schools one of the critical moments that someone named that the community ended up wanting to investigate was actually a meeting someone had where one of the development agencies said that while education isn't something that we work on a development world now that sounds like a throwaway thing right before them it was a critical moment and then the next question becomes well then who needs should be part of a discussion to really understand what happened in that moment and then you actually try to gather those people together and do the storytelling around it to do the lessons around it so really then try to inform the question that they're really trying to answer and the thing about when you do this is people are doing two things they're really letting you know a lot about what the nature is of their work or the work they've been engaged in but they're also helping themselves kind of answer some question if they think is blocking them from doing something better in their work so it's actually doing two things at the same time and in doing it by people naming these critical moments are two really illicit and get a clear idea of the kinds of opportunities and obstacles that people believe are in their work this what's really interesting is when you look at this critical moment sometimes people once they pay attention to them they actually have some understanding what's real and what's not real because they may name something that's critical and then really and had been holding in their minds critical with them and they go back and pay attention to and say well actually it really wasn't what happened really what happened was something else I actually didn't file that piece of paper I was supposed to it wasn't stated and give me alone is that I didn't file the piece of paper that would allow them to give me alone but sometimes in our ability you know people were just doing the work you know the stories and how they tell the stories about what's going on it's really confused around kind of the facts and you can use this as a technique to really kind of clear that out so I went over things really fast but I'll yeah we've opened over things really fast but I think if folks are going to try to do something and think it would be helpful to bring a set of people together to really try to learn something either around kind of how the businesses work or job seeking things or even people inside an organization like Bay State who are trying to reach out and why it's hard for their mortgages you know we could talk about this as a technique and how to adapt the technique as a way of getting at that so the projects right now is American absolves we are using an extra we're using a big project in Boston right now and also it's a work that we're doing in Central and South America I'm sure you would love to go observe that okay they're actually going to be some open sessions are going to be having toward the end of October so that actually may be a point where that to be and we also have a lot of the stuff documented in film and some synopsis that also is another way to kind of look at it and understand it ok so I left you some time let me just also i'm going to pass out these are some i called them assignments but they're sort of suggested analytical tasks that might be helpful to you in your work kind of applying some of the stuff so let me pass us out and maybe we could talk on thursday about which of any people want to do and what what information and data you would need to get that done