Harnessing social network analysis to improve heat resilience of the county’s most vulnerable.

Harnessing social network analysis to improve heat resilience of the county’s most vulnerable.

More than 80 organizations provide utility assistance in Maricopa County, but with rising temperatures and energy costs, need far outstrips available resources. Making this system more efficient and effective can mean the difference between life and death for our most vulnerable residents.

During our prototype project, we exchanged data with 30 organizations in Maricopa County including AZCEND, Salvation Army, Utility Assistance Network, SRP, ASU’s Healthy Urban Environments Initiative (HUE), Maricopa County Public Health Department, Mesa Fire and Medical Department, and other agencies that are concerned about heat exposure.

To better understand heat vulnerability and utility assistance in our county, cross-cutting design scholar Shauna BurnSilver conducted a social network analysis. Her framework will prototype an approach for KER to promote understanding of social cohesion and social capital dimensions of community resilience. This knowledge is critical in order to mobilize stakeholders for building responses to shocks and stresses in the future. BurnSilver, an associate professor in ASU’s School of Human Evolution and Social Change, has collected feedback on her framework from the Utility Assistance Network, analyzed utility assistance network relationships, and will survey growth and change in the organizational network over the coming years.

As part of this work, Executive Director Patricia Solís led members of the KER team and members of ASU’s new YouthMappers chapter in mapping the assistance network’s constituents. From this visualization, we noticed a gap in coverage. The map shows an area in Mesa affected by high rates of indoor heat deaths but with low participation in utility assistance programs.

Upon closer examination, Solís found that mobile homes made up a majority of these underserved areas, revealing a blind spot in the network.

This discovery prompted KER to conduct research focusing specifically on utility bill burden and utility assistance in zip codes with large proportions of mobile home communities. We discovered that mobile home residents are falling between the gaps of services, since they are not eligible for LiHEAP assistance. Other programs like tree shade are not relevant either, so they are disproportionately affected by heatrelated deaths.

Our findings mean that targeted intervention efforts could address these gaps in service. Such efforts contribute to meeting KER’s mission of building community resilience, help inform the design of our knowledge exchange at ASU, and will continue to serve as an important domain of future collaborative research.

KER Executive Director Patricia Solis points to the spot on the map that first revealed a gap in utility assistance for mobile home residents.