Now there’s an easy way to get a deeper knowledge about the distinctive and diverse neighborhoods that we call home.

In January 2012, after months of research and review by our partners at the Center for the Study of Brooklyn, we published the first-ever Brooklyn Neighborhood Reports. It’s a key part in our ongoing effort to get Brooklynites more informed about where they live and more empowered to take on local challenges.

The Brooklyn Neighborhood Reports—more than 600 pages in all—present comprehensive civic data profiles of Brooklyn’s 18 Community Districts, as well a Brooklyn-wide report, in a way that’s never been done before.

With critical information from the U.S. Census and other sources, each report covers nine theme areas and explores over 90 indicators of civic health.

View and download the complete
Brooklyn Neighborhood Reports

The reports feature concise, easy-to-read graphs and maps of neighborhood-level data for Demographics, Youth & Education, Economy, Housing, Environment, Health, Public Safety, Arts & Culture, and Civic Engagement—to illustrate, for example, educational attainment; employment and income; housing affordability; environmental, health, and public safety conditions; access to arts and culture; and how civically engaged residents are, in Brooklyn’s Community Districts.

“Too often, stats about Brooklyn get submerged in citywide stats that miss important local trends.”
– Brooklyn Community Foundation President
Marilyn Gelber

In 2009, as part of our transition to a community foundation and in the midst of great growth in the borough, we identified a great need for statistical trend data that a “city” of 2.5 million would typically have. We commissioned the Center to develop the Brooklyn Neighborhood Reports as part of a new joint information initiative to help us better understand transformations happening throughout Brooklyn.

“As we consider the data from across our distinct communities from Williamsburg and Bay Ridge to Park Slope and Brownsville, we begin to identify developments and disparities that confirm our progress, but also our challenges, and reveal the impact of new residents—not just former Manhattanites and the latest generation of creative young people, but an ever increasing number of striving immigrants from China, Mexico, Jamaica, and Haiti,” adds Gelber.

“We hope these Brooklyn data will not only be useful in helping grantmakers, non-profits, the business community, and public officials in their planning, but more importantly, we hope they will empower and inspire all Brooklynites to take on local challenges and create positive change from the ground up.”

The Brooklyn Neighborhood Reports are now available to support data-driven public policy, programming, and funding decisions that impact Brooklyn’s 18 Community Districts.

The first-ever Brooklyn Trends reports will also be published in 2012 by the Center for the Study of Brooklyn and the Brooklyn Community Foundation, and will provide a more in-depth examination of borough-wide and neighborhood data for the nine aforementioned theme areas.

“Brooklyn has experienced a great deal of growth and investment, and it would be easy to say that we’re doing a lot better than ten or twenty years ago,” said Center for the Study of Brooklyn Director Gretchen Maneval. “However, in order to have the most accurate understanding of the changes in Brooklyn, it’s essential that in addition to celebrating and building upon our obvious successes, we also look beyond borough-wide numbers and consider what the data at the Community District level reveal—what’s going well, and what we still need to improve upon.”

Share Your Brooklyn Knowledge

We want to hear from you about how the data in the Brooklyn Neighborhood Reports reflect your experiences living and working in Brooklyn’s neighborhoods. Share your perspective on change as part of the ongoing dialogue about Brooklyn’s future. We encourage you to join us in being a force for good in Brooklyn.

Tell us on Twitter at @DoGoodBklyn, post to our Facebook wall, or simply send us an email. Join the conversation – Do Good Right Here!