Consulting practices tend to mark their seasons by deliverables, and by that measure this has been a full autumn at Innovative Research Insights. The more useful way to take stock, however, is to ask what the deliverables have in common. The thread running through our recent work is evidence built to be used: indices, surveys, tracking systems, and planning processes designed from the outset so that the institutions responsible for acting on them can actually do so. A finding that sits in a report changes nothing. A finding attached to an actor, a mechanism, and a measure at least has a chance.
Measuring neighborhood conditions in Guilford County
The largest single undertaking of the season is the Guilford County Neighborhood Vitality Index, developed for the Guilford County Register of Deeds and the county’s Small Business and Entrepreneurship Department as the analytical core of the Community Data Atlas. The final report is now in review. Its design reflects a conviction we have written about before: a composite index earns its keep only when each component demonstrably tracks the outcomes it claims to represent, and only when safeguards ensure the index measures conditions in a place rather than the demographic composition of the people who live there. Ten validated components survived that discipline, spanning housing security, health, safety, civic infrastructure, and access to capital. The index has already done applied work this fall, supplying the neighborhood profile underlying our Washington Street analysis in High Point.
Alongside the index, we were in the field with the 2026 Community Needs Survey for the Welfare Reform Liaison Project. Because the instrument deliberately carried forward core items from WRLP’s 2020 and 2023 assessments, the study yielded trend evidence rather than another single-year snapshot: three readings on the same indicators of food security, housing stability, employment, and household finances across six eventful years.
Housing systems work in Forsyth County
Our research and planning partnership with the Forsyth County Humane Housing Network continued through the year’s convenings, building on the needs analysis, the meta-analysis of a decade of local housing studies, and the Action Planning Framework that now organizes the network’s 2026 work plan. At the August quarterly convening we presented a four-page briefing on the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, an exercise in distinguishing what a landmark statute authorizes from what anyone has yet funded.
One strand of that network’s strategy moved from plan to program this fall. Twin City Housing Collective received a $50,000 grant from The Winston-Salem Foundation to launch From Voice to Ownership, pairing a stipended Resident Advisory Council with the first cohort of a renter-to-landlord pipeline: cost-burdened renters becoming owner-occupants of duplexes and other small multi-unit homes in the neighborhoods where they already live. The twelve months ahead are implementation months, seating the Council and recruiting the first cohort, and implementation is where this strategy will be tested. Our September Triad Housing Hangout turned the series toward the other end of the housing continuum, convening practitioners from legal aid, mediation, local government, and direct service on eviction prevention and displacement.
Community-led planning on Washington Street
In High Point, Phase One of the Washington Street Project concluded in August with the partner-alignment groundwork that credible resident engagement requires: a shared evidence base, thirteen leadership asset sprints across seven sectors, and a convergence scan that named, among other things, the needs no partner currently owns. Phase Two is now wrapping up with D-UP Inc. as the neighborhood backbone, supported by the Foundation for a Healthy High Point. Residents have been meeting in study circles, beginning with housing and land use, and each circle has been paired with data prepared in advance so that deliberation starts from evidence rather than from scratch. The sequence matters. Institutional alignment first, resident deliberation second, and a shared action agenda as the product of both.
Family economic mobility beyond the Triad
Our national portfolio with The Prosperity Agenda continued to grow out of the benefit cliffs research we described in When a Raise Makes You Poorer. The Benefit Cliffs Coaching Toolkit is now in practitioners’ hands, and we are developing and annotating a Social Capital Index instrument so that family-centered programs can measure the relationships and networks that conventional financial metrics miss. Closer to home, our evaluation partnership with HELD in Greensboro continues, with client tracking updates documenting the guaranteed income and housing support model through 2027.
What is to come
The months ahead have a clear shape. The Neighborhood Vitality Index moves toward public release and integration into the county’s GIS environment, work that runs through mid-2027. The WRLP survey has closed, with analysis and trend reporting almost complete. The Washington Street study circles concluded with resident deliberation on an action agenda the neighborhood, not the consultants, will own. Twin City Housing Collective will seat its Resident Advisory Council and recruit its first pipeline cohort. The Housing Hangout series will continue its monthly community conversations, and we expect to extend the resident-led, data-grounded planning approach piloted on Washington Street to additional High Point neighborhoods in 2027.
Across all of it, the test we hold ourselves to is the same: not whether the analysis was rigorous, though it must be, but whether the institutions and residents it serves can do something different because it exists.
We are grateful to the clients, funders, and community partners who keep setting that bar with us. To discuss how this work might serve your organization or community, visit our Consulting Services page or contact us.
