Money was tight when John Romero was growing up in north Denver. His mother would walk with him and his three siblings to the Denver Santa Claus Shop, where low-income families have been receiving holiday gifts since 1931. Romero never forgot the joy of playing with an electric train set he pulled home in a red wagon when he was seven. Now he’s a senior property manager for Regency Centers, a real estate company, and when he learned the Denver Santa Claus Shop needed a new place to host its annual gift shop, he offered the use of a vacant retail space he manages. Hundreds of volunteers will distribute toys to needy children there this week, and some of the kids just might grow up to return the favor.
Tag: denver
Big Data Is Helping Big Cities
Despite all the metropolitan fiscal problems you hear about, many American cities are hitting new highs in education and health.
This is because they’re increasingly relying on huge data sets to design policy. NYPD’s Compstat program honed and enhanced its crime-fighting strategies, and in the past few years, Denver’s use of analytics raised test scores around 20 percent. The data doesn’t do the work itself, though; human workers must orient data evaluation toward a valuable target.
It’s the rosy side of government’s exploitation of new technology.