How many of those have you done?
In the past year, we did six—in Austin, Texas; Fort Smith, Arkansas; Perry County, Kentucky; Indiana County, Pennsylvania; Fresno, California; and Hattiesburg, Mississippi. And, in each case, I think community residents often either feel ignored or sometimes they just feel talked about—that their opinions and their living experiences aren’t valued at the same level as survey data.
We hope that the dashboard actually provides a mechanism to bring those two things together. Because obviously, engaging directly in conversation about what works in your community is the next step. It’s not enough to just have dots on a map. You need to be able to say, “Well, what would really make a difference here?” or, “Why is it that we think we have the solutions here but people aren’t taking them up?” Those are the kinds of conversations that people know they need to have, but they’re challenging. We hope that this provides some tools to makes those conversations easier to organize.
And we can’t provide national data on all the topics that we know are relevant. So when we do data walks, we also encourage communities to identify other trends and issues in their community that they think should literally be up on the wall. We put big posters up on the wall. And so, in some of the communities we visited, for example, people wanted to have statistics about incarceration. Or they wanted to show the really stark disparities between different racial and ethnic groups with respect to income. Or they wanted to show high foster care placements because they felt that showed a trigger for food insecurity that people needed to talk about.
So, the dashboard gets you started, but then the community can add the issues that they think are most compelling.