Equity driven. Data informed.

Originally posted on Issue №2 — May 2022

We spend a lot of time thinking about how to think about data. As advancing equity has become top-of-mind across the social impact sector, we’ve developed a values system that guides our work.

For us, being equity-driven and data-informed means:

1. Be comprehensive: Strategically leverage all the reliable information you have — program and community, quantitative and qualitative — and create what you don’t have.
2. Be focused: Use data to identify disparities and prioritize those areas and communities for programs, funding, and policy decisions.
3. Talk to people: Value lived experience as expertise, key data, and critical insight. It’ll add the why to the what, where, and how much that traditional data offers.
4. Think in systems: People’s lives are complex, and siloed solutions won’t achieve the systems change required to advance equity and improve lives.
5. Be accountable: Consider what data you’re using, how, and why; and be transparent about it.

When we expand our traditional approaches to data — big, quantitative data from federal public sources — we often miss out on local context and priorities, local strengths, how people perceive their community, and root causes.

So, let your mission be the destination and use data as your GPS. Be equity-driven and data-informed.