ACT Rochester has embarked on a new journey of improving the culture of decision making in Greater Rochester, backed by data and research.
The Rochester Area Community Foundation initiative, which was launched in 2009, has opened its doors wider to curate knowledge, catalyze improvement in decision-making, communicate data in context, and connect people and research for action.
The approach, which ACT calls the Four Cs, is grounded in rigorous research design, one of the strengths of its executive director, Meg Norris, who was hired a couple of years ago. The seeds for this vision were planted by Simeon Banister, RACF president and CEO.
“(Banister) had made a presentation that was about how ACT, given the times we were in, had the potential to, as the kids would say, level up a bit to meet the community where it was, and what the circumstances of the time were demanding of it,” Norris says. “And that meant more than just bringing data into a conversation, which I think ACT had done so well for such a long time. Now it was about also recognizing the age of information that we’re in, bringing this idea of curation.”
Information overload is real, she notes, and tends to push people away.
“When you’re bombarded with information, our human response is to say too much, and then default to your own instincts, and your own kind of bias, which is the opposite of what we want,” Norris says.
In June, ACT unveiled a refreshed online presence that illustrates how data can be contextualized, curated and put to use in effective ways. Its goal is to help define a community question or problem, identify data to address it, and connect people with similar questions or solutions that work.
“We don’t want people to have foregone conclusions or have one experience, and then look for numbers to back it up. That’s not real research,” Norris says. “What we want is to start with a problem or question, and then you work backwards to figure out what you need in order to be able to answer it.”
She points to RACF’s Community Programs department, whose objective is to catalyze community impact. ACT’s work falls in line with that, introducing a new way of thinking and tackling issues..
“There’s that commitment to catalyzing action by research, and then (connecting) data to organizations, people to people and people to data. You’re making all kinds of different connections that way,” Norris says. “So that people are thinking, and we can sort of socialize this more advanced data use that’s not just throwing numbers at something you’ve already decided, but truly the research design for how we’re going to start to tackle social problems.”
ACT’s community indicator categories, aligned with RACF, are:
■ community vitality (markers of resources and opportunities for a community’s residents);
■ demographics;
■ environmental justice and sustainability;
■ housing;
■ K-12 education;
■ poverty; and
■ transportation.
Each category then has specific indicators, evidenced by data, and connects research or applicable work in the field–in various media forms, such as a podcast or a blog. For example, community vitality tracks percent of households without internet access and households with vehicles in the region. This information supplements conversations being had at collective impact tables in the community.
In the past, ACT has been a resource for community reports—leaders have repeatedly used Ed Dougherty’s 2013 study on “Poverty and the Concentration of Poverty in the Nine-County Greater Rochester.” Such resources still exist, but the focus has shifted to indicators, data and research.
“We’re democratizing things a bit,” Norris says. “We also want to train people on how to use these things. So you’d go to the indicator pages instead of trying to find a report, and the cool thing about that is that they’re dynamic and interactive.”
The data will be updated annually.
“There’s still limitations because, as of now, our data is mostly from the American Community Survey that’s part of the Census, which has some lag time, and then there’s some New York State agency data as well,” Norris acknowledges. “So, we’re restricted in that. The asterisk that I would make there is that part of what the training and the technical assistance that I’m hoping to support and provide in our community is building towards a data infrastructure that would include more localized data.”
Norris joined ACT Rochester after Ann Johnson announced her retirement as executive director. A Rochester native, Norris returned to the area upon earning her doctoral degree in sociology at Brown University. Norris studied social inequality, social capital, and the intersection of schools, families, and neighborhoods using national datasets, and quantitative and qualitative research methods. That experience is now coming in handy.
“I made so many decisions about where I went to undergrad and what I wanted to do based on growing up here, that I came back and I felt I had I had taken what I was given from here and tried to grow it and build on it, and now was in a position to come back and give some of it back,” she says of her return.
As Norris looks ahead, her to-do list includes community partnerships to increase ACT’s capacity. In the fall, the initiative will work to develop profiles of counties that surround Monroe County. It will also host a regular event, which won’t be the report card event of yore, but related to the Four Cs framework and the path toward building a more local data infrastructure.
In the next three to five years Norris would like ACT to have more data agreements with local agencies, to create a hub for data.
“So, we’re actually taking advantage of some of the local data and learning about it,” Norris says. “If we started to use that sort of stuff and think about things and make more persuasive arguments toward this continuous improvement, we are more persuasive in our storytelling, which means it opens our opportunity for national grantmaking. Instead of just relying so heavily on local philanthropy. We can start opening the doors to national philanthropy as well.”
Smriti Jacob is Rochester Beacon managing editor. The Beacon welcomes comments and letters from readers who adhere to our comment policy including use of their full, real name. Submissions to the Letters page should be sent to [email protected].