December 20, 2016

The Difference Data Makes

My name is Apurva Mehrotra, and I’m CCC’s Director of Research and Data Analysis.

Data has always been integral to CCC’s work – for years, we’ve been collecting and analyzing data on hundreds of indicators of child well-being, and we maintain the largest municipal-level database of child well-being indicators in the country.

This year, the data team has taken our work to the next level. We just released our annual Community Risk Ranking as a standalone publication for the second year in a row. As a next step, we’re preparing to bring the risk ranking features online, allowing users to easily map where risks concentrate across the 59 community districts along with new online asset-mapping tools that will enable users to easily map the location of “assets” (resources like child care, banks, public transportation, health clinics) in every New York City community. Early next year we will also release a comprehensive report exploring the presence or absence of these assets in the neighborhood of Brownsville, Brooklyn.

Your contribution to CCC is crucial for this work to continue and succeed. 

This expansion of our online database will give lawmakers, service providers, foundations, and community members a clearer picture of the challenges facing children and families and the presence or absence of essential resources and services in each community. We hope these new tools will inform innovative thinking about the best ways to connect more residents to resources that exist, as well as develop additional services when they are lacking.

We don’t want to stop there. In 2017, we have plans to kick our data work up another notch. After our digital features go live in the new year, we’ll continue our asset mapping work – this time in Washington Heights and Central Harlem. While our data will be drawn upon to assess the presence of risks and assets in these communities, we’ll be undertaking much more qualitative work as well, interviewing community members to document their firsthand experiences.

All of these new data products are designed to bring about lasting positive change for our city’s children and families who are most at risk. In a city where more than 500,000 children live below the federal poverty line, this work is critical and can’t wait a day longer.

Your tax-deductible gift today will help all of our city’s children have a brighter tomorrow.

Sincerely,

Apurva Mehrotra, MPA
Director of Research and Data Analysis

Tags
Community Risk Ranking, Data, Keeping Track

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