Spatial Connections

The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of public consideration. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders.

Report prepared for: A Portrait of Nonprofits Serving Children in the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Area, a research project by the Urban Institute

Note: This report is available in its entirety in the Portable Document Format (PDF).

Executive Summary

The location and accessibility of nonprofit services are key factors in promoting efficient and effective service delivery networks for children and youth. Despite the importance of understanding where child and youth nonprofits are located, there is no systematic information on their spatial distribution and how their locational choices relate to the residential patterns of children and youth, particularly in high poverty areas. Using a newly developed dataset on nonprofit organizations in the D.C. area and the Urban Institute's Neighborhood Change Database, this study takes aim at this information gap by providing the first empirical assessment of the spatial allocation of locally oriented child and youth nonprofit resources in the D.C. metro area. Four key findings emerge:

• There is a wide spatial disparity in nonprofit resources for children and youth across jurisdictions in the region.
  Some jurisdictions have relatively small nonprofit child and youth infrastructures, even when the sizes of their child populations are considered. In Prince William County, for example, there is less than one nonprofit provider for every 1,000 children, compared with three per 1,000 children in the District and more than six per 1,000 residents under age 18 in Falls Church (see map 1). There are 1.1 nonprofits per 1,000 children and youth in the region, as a whole. Per capita nonprofit expenditures in Prince William County are also relatively low. These groups spend roughly $132,000 per 1,000 children, compared with more than $4.4 million per 1,000 children in the District and $5.5 million per 1,000 in Falls Church. Overall, groups in the region spend roughly $1.2 million for every 1,000 children and youth. Per capita spending on children in poverty further highlights the disparity in the availability of charitable resources among jurisdictions in the region.
• There is a slight mismatch between the locational distribution of child and youth nonprofits and neighborhoods where high percentages of children live.
  Less than two of every five child and youth nonprofits in the region, and one of every four dollars of nonprofit spending, are situated in neighborhoods that are densely populated with children, even though these areas comprise more than half of the neighborhoods in the metropolitan area. The spatial disparity is sharpest in the District, where nearly one-third of neighborhoods are densely populated with children, but only 21 percent of nonprofits and 13 percent of total nonprofit spending are sited in these areas.
• There are encouraging signs in the spatial distribution of nonprofit resources in neighborhoods with significant child and adolescent needs.
  First, the composition of nonprofit provision in neighborhoods with high rates of child poverty is skewed toward social welfare organizations—the type of child- and youth-serving groups most inclined to address directly the causes of child poverty— instead of educational or youth development/recreation nonprofits. Second, child and youth nonprofits in neighborhoods with high child poverty are generally on equal financial footing with organizations in neighborhoods where child poverty is less severe. Third, there is a near perfect spatial connection in the District—where the child poverty rate is heavily focused in the region—between the locational choices of child and youth nonprofits and the distribution of neighborhoods with high child poverty.
• The chief determinants of the spatial distribution of child and youth nonprofits across neighborhoods are child population and child poverty rates. These two factors affect the locational allocation of nonprofit resources in different ways.
  While higher rates of child poverty in neighborhoods relate to nonprofit activity, particularly among social welfare organizations, greater proportions of children, without regard to their socioeconomic background, relate to lower nonprofit activity, when controlling for other demographic and socioeconomic factors. These findings may suggest that because more affluent families are better able to access nonprofit services that are located outside of their immediate residential neighborhoods, nonprofits that do not focus specifically on serving the poor have no incentive to locate in immediate proximity to potential clients. However, the needs of poorer children, and their more limited ability to travel for services, may cause some nonprofits to locate in areas with high child poverty. Other demographic and socioeconomic neighborhood indicators have little bearing on child and youth nonprofit locational patterns in the D.C. region.

Discussion

The findings in this report provide a mixed view of the spatial relationship between child and youth nonprofits and the children they aim to serve. Because the accessibility of nonprofit resources is vital to strong social service systems, policymakers and community leaders may want to explore methods to reduce the disparity in charitable activity for children and youth across the region. One option is to provide general support to the limited number of nonprofits that operate in the neighborhoods that appear to be underserved. Local leaders may also want to build on the relatively strong spatial allocation of social welfare nonprofits in neighborhoods with high child poverty by better understanding the intricate interplay of economic and organizational factors that encourage groups to locate in high need areas. We suspect that nonprofits are drawn to high poverty neighborhoods because of a mix of socioeconomic needs and the availability of space to run their operations. Alternatively, because neighborhoods change and groups with fixed assets may be unable to move their physical operations, some nonprofits may have already been supplying children and youth services in neighborhoods where socioeconomic conditions have declined. A deeper exploration of locational incentives can help community officials cultivate the capacity of existing nonprofits and develop new groups in high poverty neighborhoods.

Note: This report is available in its entirety in the Portable Document Format (PDF).

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