South L.A. community members and youth use maps to describe safety issues around local parks

Community Coalition Community Engaged Mapping Project

In 2008, Healthy City partnered with Community Coalition around improving the quality of life for South Los Angeles residents. Community Coalition works with African American and Latino residents to build a prosperous and healthy South Los Angeles with safe neighborhoods, quality schools, a strong social safety net and positive economic development in order to reduce crime, poverty and substance abuse in the community. Community Coalition identified four areas in South Los Angeles to engage in concentrated community organizing efforts. Healthy City’s role was to provide analysis and mapping of the four identified areas as well as implement community-engaged mapping sessions to identify potential community issues for mobilization. Through this partnership, King Park was identified as area of interest for community mobilization.

Sharing tools to document community expertise

In modeling community based participatory action research (CBPAR), we applied our community-engaged mapping process as a tool for Community Coalition’s organizing techniques. We used geographic information systems (GIS) and visualization techniques to engage community residents and document their knowledge and expertise of the community. The knowledge provided has helped the community in their planning around safety issues.