Use Case: Community
Candace B. Chance, Board Director
B-Ciity (Baltimore City Intergenerational Initiatives for Trauma and Youth)
How Can Data Be Used to Create Opportunities in the Community?
B-Ciity is a community-led coalition working to find solutions to important issues facing three west Baltimore neighborhoods: Sandtown Winchester, Penn North, and Upton/Druid Heights. In a recent interview with Candace, she got right to the overall mission of B-Ciity by asking a straight forward question:
“How can we create opportunities that really change the trajectory of a child’s life who is experiencing stress and trauma in the neighborhood?
In a small way, and in one instance, data helped to provide an answer and an opportunity.
Recently B-Ciity worked with Promise Heights, an organization based in Upton/Druid Heights that partners with community groups and non-profits to “improve the educational, social, health, and economic opportunities of children from birth to young adulthood.” Several students and teachers from one of the schools it serves, Renaissance Academy High School, created a competition to design a series of infographics to help raise awareness about and market B-City. Candace described the nature of the project:
“Instead of paying professional designers to come up with an infographic, we went to Renaissance High School and paid students to work with their art teachers to come up with a series of infographics to represent what B-Ciity was… The kids had to do research into their own neighborhoods to include data points into the infographic”.
All the participating students were paid for their work and the winner was awarded a $500 prize and an internship with the Baltimore City Health Department. In this way, data was used to help generate opportunities for young people in the neighborhood.