Not As Easy As It Seems: The Challenges and Opportunities to Build Community Capacity to Use Data for Decisions and Solutions
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Achieving health equity requires building communities' capacity to mobilize, organize, and strategize to change the conditions-or social determinants of health-that impact their well-being. Community and resident-driven organizations need data to 1) bring attention to the disparities and move people into action, 2) understand the root causes and organize across sectors to deal with those root causes, 3) inform solutions that will create lasting change, and 4) monitor the change to continuously adapt and improve the solutions. To achieve all these, communities have to be able to access, share, and transform data into actionable knowledge.
Section 4302 of the Affordable Care Act and the federal government's increased willingness and capacity to make data available to the public have elevated the importance of data in generating solutions to end health inequities. Today's technology has stimulated the expansion of data platforms that allow users to download data and use data visualization techniques to illustrate health, education, housing, and other disparities by race and ethnicity, gender, geography, and other variables. Many guides have been published to assist communities to access and use data. In addition, there are many national organizations and groups such as the Community Indicators Consortium, National Neighborhood Indicators Project, and Healthy Communities Institute that are actively working with local data collaboratives to facilitate a learning community of people working at the nexus of data analytics and community change. There are even more local organizations with a similar agenda, such as The Piton Foundation, DataHaven, and Data Driven Detroit that are serving as intermediaries for data gathering, analysis, and use.
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SPOTLIGHT ON
The Community Data Collaboration Project: Developing and Testing a Framework for Community Data Use Capacity
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Data-informed strategies are critical to efforts that address health disparities and make progress toward health equity. Administrative data, as well as other national and local data, offer a wealth of resources that can be put to good use. Community Science and its partner, Community Indicators Consortium, is working with a federal agency to mine lessons from the field about facilitating community collaboration around the use of administrative and other secondary data related to social determinants of health.
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Staff Profile: Allyssa Allen
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 Allyssa Allen, Ph.D., Senior Analyst, has expertise in health equity and social determinants of health (SDOH) such as neighborhood-level food insecurity, income inequality, and residential segregation. She has worked on a variety of projects, including substantial experience working with grassroots organizations to use data to guide intervention and policy strategies. Dr. Allen has collaborated with the Druid Heights Community Development Corporation and the Baltimore Place Matters Team (Equity Matters) to pair neighborhood indicators from various public use sources with qualitative interviews about the local food environment. In her work on the National Institute on Aging's Healthy Aging in Neighborhoods of Diversity Across the Life Span (HANDLS) study, she combined individual-level health data with neighborhood indicators to understand the SDOH in Baltimore City neighborhoods. Dr. Allen is skilled in community engagement as well as participatory and community-based research and evaluation methodologies. She has been recognized by the Baltimore City Council for her community work in Druid Heights and by the Warnock Foundation as a Social Innovator for her ideas on how to repair relationships between researchers and communities.
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Community Science Day of Service
On April 28, Community Science participated in its semi-annual day of service at A Wider Circle. A Wider Circle is a nonprofit organization based in Silver Spring, Maryland, with a mission to end poverty. A Wider Circle focuses on the whole person through various services targeting workforce readiness, wellness, and housing.
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Upcoming Conferences Events
"Using Prevention Science to Promote Health Equity and Improve Well-being"
May 31-June 3, 2016
Hyatt Regency San Francisco, San Francisco, CA
14th Annual Summer Workshop
Disparities in Health in America: Working Toward Social Justice
June 20-25, 2016
University of Houston - Downtown
Whole Thinking in PracticeBell Valley Retreat at the Toll House October 14-19, 2016 Boonville, CA Application deadline: August 15, 2016
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Careers @ Community Science
We are always eager to know about professionals who have experience in producing community and systems change work of the highest quality and who want to make a difference in this world. Visit the Community Science CAREERS page to learn more about working at Community Science.
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About Community Science
Community Science is an award winning research and development organization that works with governments, foundations, and non-profit organizations on solutions to social problems through community and other systems changes. To learn more, visit our PROJECTS page.
To discuss how Community Science can collaborate with your organization, contact us at 301-519-0722 or info@communityscience.com
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