Mobilizing Youth for Data-Driven Community Change

A new report, Mobi­liz­ing Youth, spot­lights inno­v­a­tive efforts to help young peo­ple har­ness the pow­er of data and advo­cate for the changes they want to see in their communities.

The report — fund­ed by the Annie E. Casey and Robert Wood John­son foun­da­tions — shares how local orga­ni­za­tions in the Nation­al Neigh­bor­hood Indi­ca­tors Part­ner­ship (NNIP) are striv­ing to inject more youth voic­es into issues affect­ing youth. This work involves assist­ing young peo­ple with col­lect­ing and ana­lyz­ing data, incor­po­rat­ing their per­spec­tives into research, cre­ative­ly dis­sem­i­nat­ing results and rec­om­men­da­tions and more.

NNIP part­ners men­tioned in Mobi­liz­ing Youth include:

• The Insti­tute for Urban Pol­i­cy Research at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas at Dal­las, which is col­lab­o­rat­ing with local orga­ni­za­tions to pro­vide train­ing — in advo­ca­cy, analy­sis and data lit­er­a­cy — to more than 1,200 young peo­ple engaged with social jus­tice issues.
• The Urban Health Col­lab­o­ra­tive at Drex­el Uni­ver­si­ty and WorkReady Philadel­phia, which launched a skill devel­op­ment series for youth — most of them African Amer­i­can — cen­tered on health impact assessments.
• Pub­lic Health–Seattle & King Coun­ty, which enriched its 2018–2019 assess­ment of the health needs of the local les­bian, gay, bisex­u­al, trans­gen­der and queer pop­u­la­tion via lis­ten­ing ses­sions with affect­ed youth and young adults.
• Boston’s Depart­ment of Youth Engage­ment and Employ­ment and Met­ro­pol­i­tan Area Plan­ning Coun­cil, which incor­po­rat­ed youth per­spec­tives into a redesign of the city’s sum­mer jobs pro­gram — a move that made the pro­gram more effec­tive in match­ing appli­cants with employers.
• The Data Cen­ter in New Orleans and the Media Arts Depart­ment at the New Orleans Cen­ter for Cre­ative Arts, which are help­ing high-school stu­dents use film to explore local data on child well-being.

“Involv­ing young peo­ple in data and research empow­ers them to think crit­i­cal­ly about com­mu­ni­ty issues and to con­tribute new insights for address­ing those issues,” says Chris Kings­ley, senior asso­ciate for data ini­tia­tives at the Casey Foun­da­tion, ​“This approach can devel­op an emerg­ing gen­er­a­tion of lead­ers pre­pared to advo­cate for change, with endur­ing ben­e­fits for communities.”

NNIP is a part­ner­ship between the Urban Insti­tute and pub­lic and pri­vate orga­ni­za­tions in more than 30 cities. It is com­mit­ted to con­nect­ing res­i­dents with neigh­bor­hood data to help advance equi­ty and well-being local­ly. Mobi­liz­ing Youth was writ­ten by Camille H. Anoll, a research ana­lyst at the Urban Insti­tute and a mem­ber of the NNIP team.

Learn how young peo­ple are help­ing to build an equi­table data sys­tem in Broward Coun­ty, Florida