Promising Practices for Local Data Translation
Empowering Organizations to Improve Mobility in Their Communities
About the effort
How can OI data resources be used to inform policy and program at scale?
Through support from NEO Philanthropy’s Economic Mobility and Opportunity Fund, three nonprofit partners are piloting innovative ways of leveraging the underlying data from tools like the Opportunity Atlas and Social Capital Atlas to inform economic mobility initiatives within their communities. In addition to their own local impact, these efforts will shed new light on how to best translate research and data for local action and specific policy impacts. Check out how these organizations are incorporating mobility data into their projects:
Child Poverty Action Lab
Dallas, TX
With a north star mission of reducing child poverty in Dallas by 50% within a single generation, the Child Poverty Action Lab (CPAL) operates as an unofficial R&D department for the city’s economic mobility efforts. CPAL rethinks how data can be integrated into public systems, community programs, and neighborhood life to break cycles of intergenerational poverty. It is working with Opportunity Atlas data to create a dynamic tool that establishes neighborhood-level benchmarks for attrition, enabling local stakeholders to better understand how neighborhood characteristics impact resident inflows and outflows, and to identify deviations that may signal emerging displacement issues.
Leading on Opportunity
Charlotte, NC
Leading on Opportunity (LOO) aims to enhance economic mobility for all residents in Charlotte, North Carolina by collaborating with local stakeholders to address complex social issues through comprehensive and programmatic approaches. LOO is developing a 2.0 version of their Opportunity Compass, a tool that integrates data from the Opportunity Atlas, local funders, the Results for America Economic Mobility Catalog, and local experiences and narratives to update and expand on the existing Opportunity Compass prototype. This new work builds on prior partnership efforts that launched the Charlotte Opportunity Initiative to identify policy areas with the potential to increase upward mobility in Charlotte.
Southern Economic Advancement Project
12 states – Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia
The Southern Economic Advancement Project (SEAP) partners with organizations across 12 southern states to broaden economic power and promote equity. SEAP is developing a new data tool called the Our Dollars, Our Dreams Dashboard that combines Opportunity Atlas data on economic mobility with federal funding award trackers to enable stakeholders to see where federal funds are flowing relative to areas’ economic mobility needs.