Somos Neighbors: Helping understand our neighborhoods and life expectancy
Channel: NOWCastSA
Date: 2020-03-06

Our neighborhoods are so much more than just the location of the buildings we live in. Each neighborhood offers something beautiful, inspiring, and entirely unique. 
However, where we live plays a big role in how long we live, and the longest- and shortest-lived neighborhoods are separated by nearly 20 years in average life expectancy. 
The new tool, Somos Neighbors, connects us with each other, with an understanding of the neighborhoods we live in, and with action to close the life expectancy gap. 
If we work together we can live long healthy lives in the neighborhoods we love, no matter where in the county we live. 
In partnership with the Urban Institute https://www.urban.org/ and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation https://www.rwjf.org/, Somos Neighbors is one of 10 projects nationwide selected through the Visualizing and Powering Healthy Lives opportunity to use USALEEP local life expectancy data to explore and address neighborhood-level life expectancy disparities. 
The 10 projects are intended as case studies for other communities interested in using the USALEEP data https://www.naphsis.org/usaleep to understand and address place-based inequities in life expectancy. 
To learn more about the 9 other projects selected for Visualizing and Powering Healthy Lives, please visit www.puttinglocaldatatowork.org https://puttinglocaldatatowork.urban.org/
About CI:Now
Community Information Now (CI:Now) is a nonprofit organization called a local data intermediary. Our vision is improved lives and decreased disparities through democratized data. 
Founded more than 20 years ago, CI:Now provides data, analysis, training, and tools to help Texas communities make decisions that are informed by good data. As part of a community-academic partnership begun in 2008, CI:Now’s core data team is housed at the UTHealth Houston School of Public Health in San Antonio. We’ve been a member of the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP) https://www.neighborhoodindicators.org/ since 2010.