Naugatuck Valley Project
The Naugatuck Valley Project (NVP) is a Connecticut based grassroots organization that primarily focuses on issues of Housing Affordability, Healthcare access, Worker Rights and Environmental Justice.
Naugatuck Valley, Connecticut
Naugatuck Valley, Connecticut
The Naugatuck Valley Project’s problem has never been a lack of work.
It was a lack of tools to show that work to the outside world. For more than 40 years, NVP has been organizing congregations, labor unions, housing cooperatives, and ethnic organizations across Western Connecticut to push for housing affordability, healthcare access, worker rights, and environmental justice. But even so, state policymakers haven’t seen Western Connecticut as a priority.
Former NVP Director Alex Kolokotronis described the problem directly: Western Connecticut is often forgotten, treated as second class in state conversations. Data that could make the case for the region existed, but it was spread across grant reports, internal documents, and disconnected visualizations. There was no single tool that could show funders, policymakers, or potential member organizations what was actually happening in the Naugatuck Valley.
When NVP joined FCP’s Starter Dashboard Pilot Cohort — alongside leaders from St. George’s CDC and United for Brownsville — that’s what they set out to build.
NVP’s dashboard focuses on housing equity and health equity. But the choices they made about what to track reflect something specific about how they understand the problem.
Most housing dashboards measure access: how many affordable units exist, what percentage of income goes to rent. NVP’s dashboard tracks those indicators, but it also measures housing quality, the age of existing housing stock, and proximity to brownfields — industrially contaminated sites that cluster near low-income neighborhoods. Housing justice, in NVP’s framing, means more than a roof. It means a roof that isn’t making you sick.
That framing came from NVP’s decades of community organizing and the stakeholder conversations that shaped the dashboard’s design. FCP’s role was to build the infrastructure that could hold it.
Before joining the pilot cohort, NVP was working through a strategic planning process in an effort to shift from primarily reacting to ongoing crises toward identifying clear priorities based on where the evidence pointed. The dashboard was central to that shift.
For an organization that has spent 40 years building power through relationships and direct action, the dashboard helps finally make that work visible to the state’s power brokers, and it enables NVP to ask them what they’re going to do about it, now that they see it.NVP is now positioned to bring stakeholders, policymakers, and funders into a shared understanding of what’s happening in Western Connecticut. This understanding comes on NVP’s terms, with NVP’s data, framed around NVP’s analysis of what the region needs.
“Though our work is at the core place-based, we lack visual tools and platforms to showcase our work which is focused on housing, domestic workers, and healthcare. This would enable us to more effectively gain new member organizations, as well as strongly enhance our fundraising appeals to foundations, private donors, and more.“
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