2019 Impact Summit

A Colorado native, Rosemary Rodriguez is the Executive Director of Together We Count. She formerly served on the Denver City Council and as a commissioner on the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. She also chaired the 2001 Colorado Reapportionment Commission, a constitutional body responsible for redrawing legislative districts after the 2000 Census. Together We Count works to understand the apprehensions that bar hard-to-count communities from census participation and develops trustworthy information to encourage being counted.

Local and state governments are rapidly building ways to connect data from across their broad enterprises: records from Medicaid, social services, the schools, courts, and much more. By the Annie E. Casey’s Foundation’s estimate, nearly half the US population already lives in a jurisdiction operating one of these data trusts, with the potential to create much richer public indicators of the health and wealth of our communities. What might those indicators look like? And how can we advocate for them?

This panel will highlight examples of where linked data *has* helped to create new indicators – and discuss the different (dis)incentives for transparency and public indicator work within these public data trusts that may require advocacy from CIC members to overcome.

 Panelists:

• California Strong Start Index 
  Children’s Data Network (Regan Foust); CA First 5 Association; Heising-Simons Foundation
• Indianapolis Domestic Violence Dashboard
  TBD – likely Sharon Kandris, the Polis Center at IUPUI 
• Mapping Evictions in Charlotte
  Amy Hawn Nelson, Actionable Intelligence for Social Policy
  obo UNC Charlotte Urban Institute

 

Community indicators projects and the media have enjoyed a long partnership.  Journalists use data produced by community indicators projects as background information and community indicators rely on newspapers, TV and radio to share important findings from their research into community data.  With the faltering of local media, the erosion of trust in public institutions, and ready access to real and fake data at everyone's fingertips, data producers are looking for new kinds of partnerships and new models to get good data into the public sphere. This panel will explore how the media is adapting, new approaches data professionals are developing to increase their visibility, and the role of philanthropy as we move to new models.  

Journalist Tina Griego will interview Kenneth Prewitt, a former Director of the US Census Bureau, on a variety of topics related to Professor Prewitt's research on ethnoracial classification in national statistics and the use of science as evidence in policy making.