COVID-19 Response Funds - Grantmaking & Need Atlas

Project Overview

The maps on this site are part of the COVID Response Dashboard, developed by the Center for High Impact Philanthropy in collaboration with Philanthropy Network Greater Philadelphia. They include grant award data from participating funds serving Southeastern Pennsylvania and Southern New Jersey.

These maps can help you answer:

1. Which geographic areas in the region are especially vulnerable?
2. Where have grants already been awarded?

Answers to these questions can be used to inform future grantmaking. For example, in the map below, geographic areas with relatively high vulnerability rates, but relatively low grantmaking activity, may represent opportunities for greater philanthropic impact.

Grant planning overlay map

Darker shades of blue are areas of concern. They reflect Census tracts where there is more relative need (defined by a Social Vulnerability index) than relative grantmaking. Shades of white indicate relatively better alignment between need and grantmaking. Darker shades of red are places where there is more relative grantmaking compared to apparent need.

The Strategic Planning Tool is a needs assessment tool that can be used to understand alignment for a custom geographic Area of Interest, as well as other definitions of need such as health, housing, and child welfare, among others

County grantmaking and need statistics

The below table provides county-by-county comparisons of COVID-19 rates, grant awards, and overall need.

How to use the site?

The purpose of this Atlas is to allow users to visualize geographic trends in the supply of grant funding, the demand or need for that funding, and where the gap between the two remains relatively high.

Questions the atlas can help you answer

1. ‘How can I learn more about grant awards and need for each individual county in the region?’ Use the County Reports page to view detailed maps and indicators for each county in the region.

2. ‘How can my organization use these data to plan future investments?’ Use the Strategic Planning Tool to visualize need and granting by Census tract or for a custom Area of Interest. Use the overlay functionality to see, on a relative basis, where need is not being met.

3. ‘How can I compare COVID-19 rates, grant awards, and overall need across different counties?’ Use the table on the Project Overview page to compare summary statistics across counties.

The future of this effort

This is one of the first efforts we are aware of to collect and standardize geospatial grant awards information across multiple philanthropic funders. The future of this tool can help funders:

1. Improve targeting of place-based grants by understanding the social, economic, and health-related context.

2. Enable more coordinated planning by analyzing grants made by multiple funders in a single community.

3. Promote place-based evaluation by comparing outcomes for supported communities to outcomes in comparable areas.

In this project, the emphasis was to quickly build an analytical engine and visualization platform to respond to the COVID-19 crisis. We anticipate future versions to be more visually engaging and perhaps even be compatible with existing data platforms used in the philanthropic sector.

Data Sources

Theme	Source	Year	Link
Housing	American Community Survey (ACS), Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data (HIFLD)	2014-2018, 2019	https://data.census.gov/cedsci/, https://gii.dhs.gov/hifld/content/hifld-data-catalog
Demographics	ACS, HIFLD	2014-2018, 2019	https://data.census.gov/cedsci/, https://gii.dhs.gov/hifld/content/hifld-data-catalog
Employment	LODES/LEHD, BLS Unemployment	2015, 2020	https://lehd.ces.census.gov/data/, https://www.bls.gov/cew/
Food Insecurity	ACS, USDA Food Atlas	2014-2018, 2015	https://data.census.gov/cedsci/, https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-access-research-atlas/download-the-data/
Child Welfare	ACS, HIFLD	2014-2018, 2019	https://data.census.gov/cedsci/, https://gii.dhs.gov/hifld/content/hifld-data-catalog
Health	ACS, HIFLD	2014-2018, 2019	https://data.census.gov/cedsci/, https://gii.dhs.gov/hifld/content/hifld-data-catalog