Geography professor sits at the front of a 91±¬ÁĎ classroom on a recent afternoon, listening and making suggestions as students discuss the data challenges they’re having.

Some are wondering how to put data in a particular format. Others are muddling through the process of mapping data, or figuring out where to source information.

“Think about who has the data you need, and how do you shake it loose from them?” Elwood says. “There are many public and nonprofit agencies that may be holding data they’d be willing to share with you.”

The juniors and seniors in Elwood’s GIS Workshop course are applying lessons learned in class to projects with local nonprofits ranging from food banks to criminal justice organizations. The course isn’t new, but this quarter is the first time nearly all of the 10 class projects have an inequality or social justice aspect to them.

That focus is intentional: Elwood is the co-founder of the , a 91±¬ÁĎ-based international coalition she launched with fellow geography professor Victoria Lawson to reframe how poverty is perceived and researched (read a story about the initiative ). The class projects, Elwood says, dovetail with that goal and offer benefits on both sides.

“It’s best-practice learning for everybody, because the students are collaborating on a real project. They may not know anything about the Salvadoran Civil War or human rights advocacy, and the community partners might not know much about GIS,” she says.

“It’s a very consultant-like, community organizer-like experience for the students. And it’s a way for under-resourced nonprofits to maximize what’s possible for them.”

A geographic information system, or , is designed to capture, analyze and map various types of spatial and geographic data. Elwood’s students are using GIS applications in different ways to meet specific needs identified by the partner organizations. One student team is analyzing census and client data for a coalition of Seattle-area food banks to determine whether they are reaching areas with the greatest need, and to make recommendations on where to locate summer food programs for children and mobile van drop-offs for elderly clients.

Another project is using social media data to examine how public space is used around Pioneer Square, while another seeks to identify areas in three Washington counties where outreach would most benefit former inmates.

Stella Jones is part of a three-person team working with Real Change, a Seattle organization that publishes a weekly newspaper sold on the streets by low-income and homeless people. The students are analyzing data to identify which factors make some sales locations more successful than others and to develop a map showing untapped “hot spots” where vendors aren’t yet selling.

“This project is showing me how we can apply technology to various social issues in a way that can aid different organizations in their work,” says Jones, a junior and geography major. “It really fits my interests as far as where I see myself working in the world.”

Another student group is working on the 91±¬ÁĎ Center for Human Rights’ project, which is documenting atrocities committed during the El Salvador Civil War from 1980 to 1992. The students are creating an interactive map that will show where massacres occurred throughout the country and enable users to click on locations and get detailed information.

They are also making recommendations about low-cost, low-tech methods researchers can employ to gather geographic data while they’re in the field — for example, using paper maps to jot down where bodies are buried or where survivors were when incidents occurred.

, the center’s director, says the work will put the brutality of the war into a visual context that words alone cannot convey. And looking at the data in new ways, she says, might help identify new patterns or insights.

“It’s one thing to see it in an Excel file and another to see it across a map,” Godoy says. “I’m very interested in hearing what [the students] have to say, not only about our basic operational details, but also how to think a little more expansively about how to go about our research.”

Student Wyatt Hoffman, a junior in the 91±¬ÁĎ’s Community, Environment & Planning Program, says working on the Unfinished Sentences project is a more meaningful way to learn and apply GIS skills than just following a tutorial.

“I feel like I’m working on something significant,” he says. “This has a real-world impact on people.”

Students have also spent class time learning about team leadership, conflict resolution and collaboration, which means working not just with partner agencies, but also with peers who may come from very different economic backgrounds. Students who grew up in poverty, Elwood says, develop firsthand knowledge their more privileged peers may not have.

“For a student whose family relied on a food bank growing up and maybe still does, they understand in an experiential way what these agencies are doing,” she says. “It puts them in a position of authority.”

Two 91±¬ÁĎ geography professors are leading an effort with what might be considered a staggeringly ambitious goal — to reframe how poverty is perceived and studied around the world.

and are the co-founders of the 91±¬ÁĎ-based , a coalition of academic institutions and organizations around the United States and as far away as Europe, Asia and Africa. The network seeks to recast perceptions of poverty from something impacting others — what Lawson terms “this shiny object or person called the poor” — to a condition created by a complex web of societal relationships involving power and privilege.

It’s a sharp departure, they say, from the traditional view of poverty in the United States as resulting from people’s own decisions, rather than the effect of economic forces and structural inequality.

“There’s a tendency to blame the poor for their poverty,” Lawson said. “That’s the individualist explanation. There’s a lot of judgment.”

The network’s website allows members, who currently number close to 300, to share published works, access teaching resources, find out about upcoming events and peruse successful proposals for funded poverty work. It also highlights members’ projects, which range from research on in post-apartheid South Africa to a of poverty in remote locations of the Pacific Northwest.

Bringing academics together to talk about alternate ways of studying and approaching poverty, Lawson and Elwood say, can help advance research on a global scale and, ideally, influence policy decisions that impact people living in poverty.

The initiative has prompted insights on how cultural attitudes about poverty vary among countries. Colleagues in Argentina, Elwood said, interviewed middle-class residents about economic vulnerability and found that they largely saw the fallout from their country’s economic crisis in the early 2000s as a collective burden.

By contrast, she said, many Seattle residents who nearly lost their homes during the last recession “could see no connection” between their own vulnerability and that of homeless people living in their communities.

The network launched in 2013 with a five-year, from the National Science Foundation, the first-ever NSF grant for a research coordination network in geography.

“We are a groundbreaking project, in a sense,” Elwood said. “It’s a huge responsibility.

The first event was a conference last November that drew more than 300 attendees; future plans include a summer institute for junior scholars, a writing retreat and another large conference in 2018.

Lawson and Elwood are working to integrate the network into as many areas as possible. There’s an undergraduate salon series this spring focused on issues related to poverty, and plans for a research exchange that would connect students with faculty members doing poverty-related work.

Lawson, who directs the 91±¬ÁĎ’s honors program, is putting together an honors course with a relational poverty focus, and Elwood is teaching a mapping workshop that involves pairing students with community organizations on projects focused on inequality and social justice (read about it ). A group of undergraduates hosted a peer education seminar about poverty, and students are contributing to the network’s blog.

“Undergrads are hungry to get involved with this,” Elwood said.

The roots of the network date back several years, when Lawson was doing research in Ecuador on women and poverty. She became disillusioned by the realization that her work was reinforcing the notion of Latin America as poor and in need of rescuing, and the U.S. as the model for a solution. So Lawson refocused her efforts back home, collaborating on a five-year project with Lucy Jarosz, a 91±¬ÁĎ geography professor, about poverty in the American Northwest. Through that work, she said, she realized that policies around poverty were being set primarily by people who were middle class.

“The middle classes have the power to say what constitutes poverty because they design policy,” she said. “They are the gatekeepers and leaders of their communities. So what they say about who is poor and why becomes deeply influential.

“We realized that a lot of the ways poverty is framed, defined and understood is done by people in power, not by people who are poor. That was the birthing of this network.”

Lawson teamed up with Elwood, who has a background in community organizing around affordable housing and gentrification, and the two created the network. Its launch comes at a time when issues around inequity are dominating national and local discourse — 2016 presidential hopefuls from both parties are talking about , and in Seattle, skyrocketing rents, livable wages and increased homelessness are increasingly pressing concerns.

“We’re in a moment not just regionally, I think, but globally, of looking at how we address the question of poverty,” Elwood said.

Lawson and Elwood envision the network as an international community of geographers, historians, economists and others who can learn from one another and collectively redefine the global research agenda around poverty.

“It’s not that we want to replace a lot of great work that’s being done, but we want to expand that conversation,” Elwood said.