Leveraging Community Organization and Research Partnerships for Stronger Data Cultures
by Sonia Torres Rodríguez and Fay Walker
A publication of the Local Data for Equitable Recovery Resource Hub
Food insecurity has been an increasingly urgent challenge for the Houston region, especially during recent crises like Hurricane Harvey, the COVID-19 pandemic, and Winter Storm Uri. Urban Harvest, a nonprofit seeking to cultivate thriving communities through community gardening and healthy food access, has been on a multiyear journey to become more data-driven to better provide healthy food options to all Houstonians. Last year, a partnership with the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University helped them advance in their data-driven performance assessment journey and improve food security for their community. Their story illustrates the payoff from collaboration between research partners and community organizations to further mutual goals and shares guidance for other organizations seeking to build capacity to use data for community change.
Urban Harvest launched a mobile market in August 2020 to ensure access to healthy food throughout Houston’s most underserved areas. The mobile market acts as an information hub for community-based food resources and is a place where people can purchase double the amount of local produce with their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits (Urban Harvest’s Double Up Houston program). Urban Harvest needed timely data on areas with the greatest number of residents struggling with food insecurity, especially during the pandemic, to help identify where the mobile market would reach the most people. To support data collection and analysis, they applied for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s (RWJF’s) Using Data to Inform Local Decisions on COVID-19 Response & Recovery grant program, enlisting the participation of the Kinder Institute as a trusted research partner.
The joint research effort drew upon the strengths of the two organizations, centering Urban Harvest’s needs, to inform their programming. Urban Harvest and the Kinder Institute collaborated on collecting qualitative data, which included two focus groups — one in English and one in Spanish — with SNAP participants. These focus groups explored how people made decisions about feeding themselves and their families, their grocery shopping habits and preferences, and their barriers to getting healthy food. The Kinder Institute team also collected administrative data from Urban Harvest on participants’ characteristics and how they access services from the Double Up Houston program. The team paired this information with data on socioeconomic characteristics and assets of key neighborhoods and locations, including Double Up Houston sites, community centers, schools, and health clinics.
With the support of the Kinder Institute, Urban Harvest now uses a new internal ArcGIS tool that includes all the data from their joint project as distinct map layers. This resource helps Urban Harvest choose new sites or new organizational partnerships so the mobile market can have more extensive and equitable community reach. As Katie Wang, program manager at the Kinder Institute, shared: “We had a lot of conversations about why data was important, how [Urban Harvest] used the tool, that ultimately influenced how we designed the tool.” In other words, Urban Harvest and the Kinder Institute collaborated to create a stronger overall product, exchanged ideas to grow organizationally, and set the foundation for helping more people access healthy food.
Although Urban Harvest and the Kinder Institute made their data-driven journey look easy and seamless, their partnership focused on evidence-based decisionmaking has been years in the making. Since 2018, Urban Harvest has been investing in resources and technologies and, most importantly, achieving small and consistent wins toward a culture around data and accountability.
Building a trusting relationship with an academic research partner like the Kinder Institute was integral to Urban Harvest’s success in fostering a culture of data use. This relationship began with the Kinder Institute’s technical assistance and intern support through their Community Bridges program. Over the years, practicing good communication and mutual respect have led to a true partnership. Their investment in collaboration placed them in a strong position to apply for the RWJF grant opportunity on short notice and quickly get the research off the ground.
This partnership is possible because Urban Harvest staff made the organizational journey to recognize the value of data in their mission, as illustrated above. As Libby Kennedy, director of strategic partnerships at Urban Harvest, shared at a recent National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership event, “Since we started in 1994, it’s been a winding road. We started… just helping gardens become sustainable, or starting food markets, but there was not a culture of data…. It was not a priority. Data was complicated, and not necessary, because we just needed to help people. We realized that if we didn’t have data, we would not be effective in our efforts. We started taking data more seriously in 2018 when we hired a consulting company to develop a strategic plan.”
As Urban Harvest builds on their skills as data-driven decisionmakers, they are creating opportunities to share their lessons with others. They recently hosted the Data Driven Food Systems Round Table, where more than 20 nonprofit, research, and business partners met to discuss food insecurity through available data. Paula Balbontín, programs and development manager at Urban Harvest, said this event “was a great opportunity to talk about how our organizations can be more efficient — everyone together — and how we can centralize data to be more effective for our target population.”
Overall, more places should invest in research and community partnerships as a powerful way to meet community needs both during crisis and in recovery. Research organizations that prioritize and expand community partners’ capacity to see value in, understand, and use data are those most likely to create effective partnerships with community organizations.
We thank Urban Harvest and the Kinder Institute for Urban Research for their contributions to this blog post. The two organizations are one of the grantees of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Using Data to Inform Local Decisions on COVID-19 Response & Recovery program.
