A lack of data continues to hinder efforts to cure the problems of poverty areas. This project was designed to determine possible means to gather the needed data, so that program planners could make decisions based on facts rather than intuition. Although this is a case study of an inner-city poverty area of Philadelphia, the need for data and the methodology for establishing a manpower information system are discussed in a broad perspective, so that the experience can be generalized to describe any similiar urban areas. The second part of this report compares alternative sources of manpower data for the area. By focusing attention on the data systems of large public agencies, such as educational and law enforcement services, the researchers found a vast quantity of untabulated data. Similarities discovered in types of data gathered and in problems encountered by the different agencies indicate that a good potential exists for interagency cooperation to provide efficiently an improved data system. (BH)