The Manhattan Times

Census numbers equal dollars for non-profits

by Adam Garrett-Clark

Five years ago, turf wars in Inwood were so malicious, kids were getting jumped while walking home with their mothers, former youth counselor Angelo Ortiz remembers.

The blocks along Post Avenue north of Dyckman Street between Nagel and Sherman Avenues produced some of the most violent youth in the community, he said. It was a major drug route in the area, and to those who lived there it was common knowledge that the Post Avenue corridor was a problem spot in need of community services.

Proving that fact to gain wider attention and drive resources to the problem was a different story.

That’s where Ortiz, now program director at the Inwood Community Services, transformed himself into a shrewd statistician.

“This particular data set is really powerful,” he explains while scanning an Excel spreadsheet in his office on Academy Street.

Ortiz created the spreadsheet using information collected on Northern Manhattan from the 2000 census, recording and grouping numbers from areas as small as a city block to create a detailed picture of the area.

Ortiz describes the document and others he’s created over the years using census data as a goldmine for community analysis and advocacy.

Within this particular spreadsheet for instance, Ortiz can see that roughly seven out of nine kids in Inwood, ages five through 14, live east of Broadway and that the median household income for both Washington Heights and Inwood nearly doubles when comparing the east versus the west side of Broadway.

In the case of the Post Avenue corridor, Ortiz saw that the area had a large number of children, low average incomes and a high concentration of households headed by single moms.

This was exactly the type of hard data that government agencies respond to, he said. In the last nine years, basing his grant applications on census analysis, Ortiz has brought $3.9 million dollars into Inwood.

With the 2010 census on the horizon, Ortiz presented his experiences at a forum hosted by Assembly Member Adriano Espaillat on Oct. 14, essentially making the case that having an accurate count of Northern Manhattanites can be leveraged to bring real benefits for the community.

Based on his analysis Ortiz began “Project Post” several years ago, initiating a series of partnerships with larger organizations in the area to help the troubled set of blocks.

In 2005, he convinced the Columbia Center for Youth Violence Prevention to put up the $13,000 needed to start a summer play street on Post Avenue.

The Police Athletic League later took up the program and, when they backed out last summer because of budget cuts, the parents of the area stepped in to keep it alive, donating what they could.

A local tenants association has formed, and Ortiz continues to place a priority on placing young people from the area in the other youth services that have since formed in Inwood.

Still Ortiz acknowledges, “There’s a lot more work that needs to be done.”

Sixty percent of funding to nonprofits in the human services sector in New York City come from government grants or contracts, according to Dr. John Seley, Director of the New York City Nonprofits Project, a group that studies trends in the city’s nonprofit sector.

“We all know the situation in regards to the city’s budget,” Seley said. “If the government shrinks so does the nonprofit sector,” he said, meaning some smaller organizations will die.

Survival and or success, he said, is directly correlated to the priority an organization places on fundraising. Those that spend more on fundraising usually raise more money, he said.

He has also seen a trend in recent years of organizations applying to more outlets for funding rather than depending on one source.

Ortiz’ switch from counselor to statistician and grant writer happened by accident, he explains. He recognized when he began as a counselor in the 1990s that there were sparse community services north of W. 192nd Street.

Ortiz began writing grant applications, making the case that there was a large number of residents underserved in the Inwood community. He failed to get money at first but, “We really started putting Inwood on the map with that data,” he said.

Since then, he said, larger social service organizations like Alianza Dominicana and Children’s Arts and Science Workshops have moved some of their operations further north and a number of groups hold community service events in the area throughout the year. “Now we don’t get sloppy seconds,” Ortiz said. “We’re not just a suburb of Washington Heights anymore.”

The Manhattan Times is the bilingual newspaper of Washington Heights and Inwood.