Using Data for Advocacy: Jacksonville's Nonprofits Make a Stand

Thanks to Abel Harding and his JaxPoliticsOnline blog for this video of yesterday's press conference at City Hall, where local nonprofits used data to make their case that city funding for nonprofits not be slashed during these difficult financial times.

I thought you might enjoy the different ways the numbers are presented and displayed -- comparisons to familiar terms, straight-up statistics, visual representations of the numbers, and more.



Any thoughts?

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How Do You Use Community Indicators?

I was asked recently about how community indicators are actually used in a community to make things better. The context of the question was this: Someone new stepped into an organization that had an existing (and very good) community indicators program. She interviewed key stakeholders in her community and found two general responses: first, that people knew of and appreciated the community indicators project; second, that no one was quite sure what to do with it.

I suspect this is a question most of us face in our communities. What do you do with these indicators reports? Let me share with you an edited/expanded version of my answer, and get your feedback on anything I left out or need to clarify.

I firmly feel that community indicators need to serve as an integral part of a community change model. I've talked about that before on this blog, and I'll likely be talking about it again. We don't do indicators because they're pretty, or cool, or nice to have (though they are all of the above.) We do indicators because we want to help make the community better.

This community change model, the way we use it in Jacksonville, begins with a shared vision for the future. You have to have at least a broad idea of where you want to go.

The indicators then measure where we are in relation to that vision – are we getting closer to the desired future, or farther away. The indicators are not just about the specific aspects they measure – high school graduation rates aren’t just about high school seniors, but provide an overall proxy measurement of the effectiveness of the entire school system to achieve the desired results. The indicators point to areas of progress and areas that need greater community attention.

But the indicators themselves don’t identify solutions. They are descriptive, not prescriptive. They flag items of community concern, not just because we care about (in this example) education, but because this is an area we need to work on to improve our overall community and get closer to our shared vision. They set a general community agenda for action.

When the indicators identify priorities for community action, they need to trigger some sort of planning process. The indicator says something’s not working right in our current systems – what do we do about it? This planning process needs to identify strategies for action. Who will do what to address the issues identified by the indicators?

These plans need to be implemented. Someone needs to make sure the community follows through. This is where the indicators inform the decision-making processes of community institutions, from government to nonprofits to business entities and faith institutions and anyone else with a vested interest in the community. This is why the “shared vision” part is critical – to achieve the shared vision will usually take shared action, and people/institutions stepping out of traditional roles to address the shared community priorities identified by the indicators. This is one of the great strengths of the community indicators process: moving a community issue from “their problem” to “our problem.”

The actions will have results, and those outcomes need to be identified. The real success of the efforts to improve the community should be evaluated/assessed through the indicators themselves – did our strategies work? Did we make a difference? Based on what the indicators tell us, we may need to revisit our vision, rethink what we are measuring, or go back to the drawing board and develop new strategies for action.

That’s both why indicators are so important, and how to use them effectively:

1. To identify shared priorities for action;
2. To inform strategies and community planning efforts;
3. To hold the community accountable for action;
4. To assess results and evaluate success; and
5. To measure progress toward a shared community vision.

That’s the general overview. There isn't one right way to make them work, or one right set of actors to use the indicators to make change. In Jacksonville, the community indicators are used:

1. To inform philanthropic grant-making efforts
2. To develop Chamber of Commerce focus actions
3. To create the annual curriculum for our Leadership Jacksonville programs
4. To identify topics for public television/radio programming
5. To support grant-writing efforts
6. To influence legislation and policy-making at the local, state, and national level
7. To ask for community investment and increased corporate responsibility from local corporations
8. To bring together collaborative partnerships around an issue and break down silos
9. To highlight areas for further study, both in our own organization and in academic and other research areas

And more. As the indicators become institutionalized in the community, their influence broadens, but the role of the community indicators practitioner, besides sharing the data, is to help insure that they are being actively used to galvanize action.

How we do that is the subject of another blog post.

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Radical Math: Social Justice and Statistical Literacy

A recent conference explored the potential relationship between math instruction and social justice. For those of us using community indicators to create community change, some of the same lessons apply -- and the good news is that these lessons are now available in a standardized curriculum.

There's a resource called Radical Math that provides this framework to connect learning math with social justice. From the guide (PDF), here's two reasons why integrating these two concepts makes sense:

• Good math doesn’t mean good politics
  There are some textbooks and popular curricula that are useful for teaching young people mathematics. Many of these texts even use real-world contexts for instruction. However, very few of them are relevant to our young people, and they don’t have students investigate issues of social justice. Talking about a jar of Jelly Beans can be a fun way to learn about probability. But studying probability in the context of a unit on how the Lottery increases the economic divide between rich and poor will allow the class to cover the same mathematical content while simultaneously investigating an important issue of economic inequality.
  
• Good politics doesn’t mean good math
  Many people often make the mistake of thinking that just because we are talking about important and relevant issues, that there is good teaching and learning going on in our classrooms. Unless the math content itself is strong, even the most provocative conversations and lessons are actually doing students a disservice. It is an act of social in-justice to deny young people the opportunity to master the math that they are in your class to learn.

There's a fascinating article called Making Numbers Count at Tolerance.org that discusses this approach to learning math. I liked this quote from Janet Wayne, an 11th-grade math teacher in Los Angeles:

"These kids got involved socially and politically in their communities because they knew the numbers," Wayne says. "And I have to tell you, that's why I love math."

The approach is not without its critics, of course. I'll leave the arguments about politics in the classroom to others. But finding a way to increase statistical literacy by using real-world social justice data can't be all bad.

The resources page at Radical Math links to a series of background information (and a number of indicators data sources).

If you've been working with local math classes with your community indicators projects to provide the data for them to learn about graphs and data analysis, please share. If you aren't, here's an interesting idea to explore.

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Are You Ready for the Shift?

Here's a video that's worth watching to see how quickly the world is shifting -- and data play a key role. Karl Fisch presents Shift Happens.



It's six minutes long, and it's just as effective without the accompanying music, so feel free to watch it with your speakers off if you'd like.

Special thanks to Albino Blacksheep for the video.

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Measuring Community Well-Being

On the rethos.com blog, Chris Advansun makes an interesting observation about community well-being based on his living experiences in Harlem and Toronto.

After sharing his descriptions of both places, he concludes with the following:

The United Nations’ Human Development Index, widely used to compare and contrast standards of living between countries across the globe, integrates literacy, life expectancy, education and gross domestic product (GDP) into its formula. This is a good start, but still fails to measure certain aspects of well-being, such as those concluded in the Harlem vs. suburbs exercise. How close do citizens feel to their neighbors, how much use do they make of their neighborhood and how interwoven is their community?

Perhaps reducing well-being to one universal formula is impossible, because different populations would disagree with the very indicators upon which the formula is based. Harlem would perhaps value community and open block parties more than the suburbs, which would place privacy and personal security at a higher importance. But at the very least, we must use more diverse indicators to measure and understand well-being. The suburbs may enjoy higher rates of employment, but if they come second to the inner-city on community indicators, who’s better off?

You may want to take a look at what they're trying to build at rethos.com. The founders are trying to create an online social network "to be the platform for individuals, non-profit organizations and socially responsible companies to rethink their role in the world, the urgency of issues facing our planet, and the real ability we have to unite to affect change."

It's one of a number of new attempts to leverage the "Web 2.0" for social change. I'll try to pass along those I run across that seem to have intersection points with community indicators. Please share any others you find as well.

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Using the Web to Make Change

Community indicators are primarily about community improvement, right? We measure conditions in the community in order to inspire action and measure progress toward reaching a desired community vision or goal. Otherwise, this would just be an interesting exercise in data retrieval and display (not that there's anything wrong with that!)

Allison Fine, who wrote Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age, gives us a brief summary of how to use the Web to connect people and move ideas forward. (I like that one of the reviewers of her book recommends it as a companion volume to Made to Stick).

In her article, Using Tech to Connect: Social Media Tools for Social Change, Fine lays out a series of tips for using the internet to connect people and ideas and help them become effective in community improvement efforts. She also provides examples of model websites to show what she's talking about. It's worth a read.

In a related article, Britt Bravo provides tips for how to use blogs to make change, and provides a sample list of blogs for consideration. (This blog is not on the list.)

Let me know what other resources you find useful to use technology to promote social change, especially those who use community indicators as ignition points.

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